Threat models and security issues in wireless sensor networks

Security is a crucial issue for wireless sensor networks due to the deployment nature and the resources limitations of tiny sensor devices used in such networks. Sensor networks are used sometime in very sensitive applications such as healthcare and military. With this in mind we must address the security concerns from the beginning of network design. Owing to limited resources and computing constraints security in sensor networks poses more severe challenges as compare to the traditional networks. There are currently enormous approaches in the field of wireless sensor networks security. No comprehensive study lists the security issues and the threat models which pose unique threats to the wireless sensor networks. In this paper we have corroborated well known security issues and have provided the direction of research towards effective countermeasures against the threats posed by these issues.