A Survey on Cryptographic Approaches to provide privacy preservation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed independent autonomous sensors that
monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, pressure, etc. They cooperate with each other
and pass their sensor activity information to each other. The development of wireless sensor networks was inspired by
military applications like battlefield surveillance, etc. Today such networks are being used in many industrial and
consumer applications, like industrial process monitoring and control, machine health monitoring, and so on. Many
algorithms are already developed for obtaining security and privacy preservation in wireless sensor network but they
have many limitations. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has many advantages in real-world applications, but it is also
prone to various vulnerabilities. The threats faced by these networks are similar but are not limited to the threats seen in
simple network of computers or Internet. Due to vulnerabilities on WSNs the malicious attacker node can access
sensitive information that is transferred among the sensor nodes without encryption. One way to avoid this is to encrypt
the data being transferred from source to destination. This provides privacy because malicious users cannot read
encrypted data. There are many already designed and tested encryption algorithms to achieve this. In this paper, we have
surveyed and compared some of those encryption algorithms.