UML Modeling of Physical and Data Link Layer Security Attacks in WSN

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are growing extremely and becoming more and more attractive for a variety of application areas such as surveillance of information, industrial secrets, air pollution monitoring, area monitoring, and forest fire detection, home automation, industry monitoring, and many more. As WSN is mostly used for gathering application specific information from the surrounding environment, it is highly essential to protect the sensitive data from unauthorized access. WSNs are vulnerable to various security attacks because of broadcast nature of radio transmission. The primary weakness shared by all wireless application and technologies is the vulnerability to security attacks/threats. The performance and behaviour of a WSN are vastly affected by such attacks. In order to be able to better address the vulnerabilities of WSNs in terms of security, it is important to understand the behaviour of the attacks. This paper aims at addressing behavioral modeling of critical security attack residing in the physical layer and data link layer of wireless sensor network. UML gives the finest diagrammatic representation of any system which is best for developers. Our efforts to synchronize WSN with UML are discussed in the paper. The security attacks are modeled by using state machine diagram of Unified Modelling Language (UML). This modeling of security attacks will help programmers to develop counter measures. General Terms Wireless Sensor Network Keywords Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), Physical layer, data link layer, unified modelling language (UML), state machine diagram, security and attacks.