Security of Wireless Communication

What are the real security issues of wireless communication and wireless sensor networks in particular? Despite predictions of wireless sensor networks being deployed in many aspects of everyday life, real world deployments are still quite sparse. It seems that monitoring of large civil engineering structures is one of the few applications where wireless sensor networks may give enough value for the necessary investment. The least, several companies managing large civil structures in the UK are keen on investigating the potential of wireless sensor networks. In the light of this technology, which is built on a new paradigm of dense wireless communication networks, we can see new security challenges never experienced by engineers before. Can we appreciate the difference between wire and wireless communication and also the difference between centralised wireless networks, e.g., WiFi and largely decentralised sensor networks? We show how the shift in the technology introduces new problems that need to be solved to provide secure communication systems. The second part of the paper details particular attacks that work against current implementations of wireless sensor networks and routing, traffic analysis, and cryptography in particular.