Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
2.2.2 Threats to Control
2.2.2.1 Man-in-the-Middle Attack
Man-in-the-middle attack is one of the classical attack vectors that can be executed in
a WSN environment (Figure 2.2). In this type of attack, the attacker intrudes into the
network and makes an effort to establish an independent connection between a set of
nodes and the sink node. The nodes in the network are unaware that the entire flow
control is being handled by the attacker. He can be in either a passive or an active state.
In a passive state, he simply relays every message among the nodes with the intention of
performing an eavesdropping attack. In an active state, he can tamper with the inter-
cepted data in an attempt to break authentication (Authentication is discussed below).
The attack can be executed at the physical, data link, network, and application layers
(Anand et al. 2005).
2.2.2.2 Radio Interference
With the increase in the number of wireless technologies using the same open spec-
trum band (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, or 900 MHz), there is bound to be radio interference.
For example, in a dense urban environment, where cordless phones share the same
spectrum, there is a sharp degradation of individual node performance due to radio
interference. Similar problems can be foretold for sensor networks with the increase in
sensor nodes per network. The result of such interference could lead to change in the
information bits transmitted over the wireless medium, thereby making the bits unin-
telligible and ultimately being dropped by the receiver (Xu et al. 2008). Hence, radio
Figure 2.2. Man-in-the-Middle Attack in WSN
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