Unified Modeling Language based analysis of security attacks in wireless sensor networks: A survey

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are rapidly emerging because of their potential applications available in military and civilian environments. Due to unattended and hostile deployment environments, shared wireless links, and inherent resource constraints, providing high level security services is challenging in WSNs. In this paper, we revisit various security attack models and analyze them by using a well-known standard notation, Unified Modeling Language (UML). We provide a set of UML collaboration diagram and sequence diagrams of attack models witnessed in different network layers: physical, data/link, network, and transport. The proposed UML-based analysis not only can facilitate understanding of attack strategies, but can also provide a deep insight into designing/developing countermeasures in WSNs. © 2011 KSII.