D.G.Anand, Dr.H.G.Chandrakanth, Dr.M.N.Giriprasad / International Journal of Engineering Research and Applications (IJERA) ISSN: 2248-9622 www.ijera.com Vol. 2, Issue 1,Jan-Feb 2012, pp.911-916 911 | P a g e SECURITY THREATS & ISSUES IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS D.G.Anand, Sri Krishna Institute of Technology, Bangalore, Karnataka. Dr.H.G.Chandrakanth Sri Krishna Institute of Technology, Bangalore, Karnataka. Dr.M.N.Giriprasad Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University College of Engineering, Anantapur, Andra Pradesh ABSTRACT The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) increasingly becoming more practicable solution to many challenging applications. One of the major applications of the sensor networks is in military. So providing security is particularly challenging and its security mechanisms are also be the greatest concern to deploy sensor network such hostile unattended environments, monitoring real world applications. In this paper we attempt to analyze the various threat models, attacks on WSN and respective defensive measures available relevant to security networks highlighting their advantages and weaknesses. Keywords– Attacks, Threats, Security, Sensor nodes, Wireless Sensor Network. Security issues INTRODUCTION Wireless Sensor Network is a promising platform for a variety of application areas in such as environmental monitoring, battlefield surveillance, and homeland security domains and it is attracting many researchers to work on various problems related to this domain. The coverage, connectivity and energy related issues are very important in WSNs. But WSNs appears that they are more prone to attacks than wired networks. In applications like military, without security, the use of Wireless Sensor Network is any application would result in disastrous consequences. Security allows Wireless Sensor Networks to be used to maintain integrity of data and availability of all messages in the presence of resourceful adversaries. The main objective of confidentiality and authenticity is expected in sensor networks to safe guard the information traveling among the nodes of the network or between the sensor nodes and the sink node from disclosure. The WSNs are comprised of a group of nodes for scalar or multidimensional data gathering. Sensor nodes are employed to collect the information, compress and process it for storage purpose and to transmit the processed data to a sink such as an intermediate cluster head or a base station (also called as gateway sometimes). The transmitted information is then presented to the system by base station connection. They are open to different varieties of attacks, including node capture, and denial of service and tampering physically, promoting a range of fundamental research challenges [1] In WSNs, the primary challenges of sensor networks are by two facts. First, sensors are extremely energy constrained. Secondly, in most of the applications nodes will be randomly deployed. This randomness leads to the issue of dimensioning the sensor network. The nodes deployed may be either in a controlled environment where monitoring, maintenance and surveillance are very difficult. In the uncontrolled environments, security for sensor networks becomes extremely important. In this paper we discuss the most common security services and issues in wireless sensor networks and try to give a comparative note of various existing security approaches. The paper is organized as follows. Section-1 provides a brief overview of wireless sensor networks, their evolution, major research initiatives and future applications along with issues of sensor Network. Section-2 Different types of Security attacks. Section-3 Security issues & challenges are discussed. Section-4 highlights the related work in sensor networks. Section-5 concludes the paper by highlighting the problems of sensor networks and future directions. Network hole appears in the network due to the destruction of group of nodes. Holes in networks often cause failures in message routing due to the local minimum problem. Therefore, traditional geographic routing protocols cannot be applied with such topology management protocols. This paper addresses the security concerns in wireless sensor networks. More specifically, we address the wormhole attack, which is a severe attack in wireless sensor networks whereby an attacker stores transmitted packets and then replays them into the network. Defending against such an attack is challenging because it can be