A Comprehensive Study on Applications of Blockchain in Wireless Sensor Networks for Security Purposes

Authors

  • Mui Duc Nguyen Thai Nguyen University of Technology
  • Minh Tuan Nguyen Thai Nguyen University of Technology
  • Thang Chien Vu Thai nguyen University of Information and Communication Technology
  • Tien Minh Ta Thai Nguyen University of Technology
  • Quang Anh Tran Thai Nguyen University
  • Dung The Nguyen Thai nguyen University of Information and Communication Technology

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.62411/jcta.10486

Keywords:

Attacks, Blockchain security, Consensus, Node authentication, Wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The paper evaluates potential applications of blockchain technology in enhancing the security and reliability of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The existing vulnerabilities in WSNs, such as concerns regarding data integrity and security, demand innovative security solutions. Through systematic analysis, this paper provides valuable insights to expand understanding of WSNs security, explaining the feasibility and benefits of deploying blockchain technology. Possible attacks in the networks are classified to point out either risks or potential solusions to protect the networks. By exploring the integration of Blockchain within WSNs, the paper highlights its potential to minimize various security risks. In addition, this work discusses the challenges and considerations associated with implementing Blockchain in WSNs. Overall, this paper contributes on securing WSNs and underscores the role of blockchain technology as a promising way for enhancing security of WSNs.

Author Biographies

Mui Duc Nguyen, Thai Nguyen University of Technology

Department of Electrical Engineering, Thai Nguyen University of Technology, Viet Nam

Minh Tuan Nguyen, Thai Nguyen University of Technology

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Minh T. Nguyen is currently the director of international training and cooperation center at Thai Nguyen University of Technology, Vietnam, and also the director of advanced wireless communication networks (AWCN) lab. He has interest and expertise in a variety of research topics in the communications, networking, and signal processing areas, especially compressive sensing, and wireless/mobile sensor networks. He serves as technical reviewers for several prestigious journals and international conferences. He also serves as an editor for wireless communication and mobile computing journal and an editor in chief for ICSES transactions on computer networks and communications. He is in the 2023 Stanford's list World Top 2% scientists. He can be contacted at email: nguyentuanminh@tnut.edu.vn.

Thang Chien Vu, Thai nguyen University of Information and Communication Technology

Department of Electronics Engineering, Thai Nguyen University of Information and Communication Technology, Viet Nam

Tien Minh Ta, Thai Nguyen University of Technology

Department of Electronics Engineering, Thai Nguyen University of Information and Communication Technology, Viet Nam

Dung The Nguyen, Thai nguyen University of Information and Communication Technology

Department of Electronics Engineering, Thai Nguyen University of Information and Communication Technology, Viet Nam

References

J. Yick, B. Mukherjee, and D. Ghosal, "Wireless sensor network survey," Comput. Networks, vol. 52, no. 12, pp. 2292–2330, Aug. 2008, doi: 10.1016/j.comnet.2008.04.002.

Q. Wang and I. Balasingham, "Wireless Sensor Networks - An Introduction," in Wireless Sensor Networks: Application-Centric Design, InTech, 2010. doi: 10.5772/13225.

L. B. Ruiz, J. M. Nogueira, and A. A. F. Loureiro, "MANNA: a management architecture for wireless sensor networks," IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 116–125, Feb. 2003, doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2003.1179560.

M. Tuan Nguyen, K. A. Teague, and N. Rahnavard, "CCS: Energy-efficient data collection in clustered wireless sensor networks utilizing block-wise compressive sensing," Comput. Networks, vol. 106, pp. 171–185, Sep. 2016, doi: 10.1016/j.comnet.2016.06.029.

I. Khan, F. Belqasmi, R. Glitho, N. Crespi, M. Morrow, and P. Polakos, "Wireless sensor network virtualization: early architecture and research perspectives," IEEE Netw., vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 104–112, May 2015, doi: 10.1109/MNET.2015.7113233.

M. T. Nguyen and K. A. Teague, "Distributed DCT based data compression in clustered wireless sensor networks," in 2015 11th International Conference on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN), Mar. 2015, pp. 255–258. doi: 10.1109/DRCN.2015.7149022.

D. Martins and H. Guyennet, "Wireless Sensor Network Attacks and Security Mechanisms: A Short Survey," in 2010 13th International Conference on Network-Based Information Systems, Sep. 2010, pp. 313–320. doi: 10.1109/NBiS.2010.11.

M. Nguyen, C. Nguyen, and H. T. Tran, "A Framework of Deploying Blockchain in Wireless Sensor Networks," EAI Endorsed Trans. Ind. Networks Intell. Syst., vol. 9, no. 32, p. e3, Aug. 2022, doi: 10.4108/eetinis.v9i32.1125.

D. G. Padmavathi and M. D. Shanmugapriya, "A Survey of Attacks, Security Mechanisms and Challenges in Wireless Sensor Net-works," Int. J. Comput. Sci. Inf. Secur., vol. 4, no. 1, Sep. 2009, [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.0576

C. Karlof and D. Wagner, "Secure routing in wireless sensor networks: attacks and countermeasures," Ad Hoc Networks, vol. 1, no. 2–3, pp. 293–315, Sep. 2003, doi: 10.1016/S1570-8705(03)00008-8.

Y. Sun, Z. Han, and K. J. R. Liu, "Defense of trust management vulnerabilities in distributed networks," IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 112–119, Feb. 2008, doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2008.4473092.

Y. Yu, K. Li, W. Zhou, and P. Li, "Trust mechanisms in wireless sensor networks: Attack analysis and countermeasures," J. Netw. Comput. Appl., vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 867–880, May 2012, doi: 10.1016/j.jnca.2011.03.005.

W. Xu, W. Trappe, Y. Zhang, and T. Wood, "The feasibility of launching and detecting jamming attacks in wireless networks," in Proceedings of the 6th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing, May 2005, pp. 46–57. doi: 10.1145/1062689.1062697.

W. Xu, W. Trappe, and Y. Zhang, "Channel surfing," in Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks - IPSN '07, 2007, p. 499. doi: 10.1145/1236360.1236423.

E. Shih et al., "Physical layer driven protocol and algorithm design for energy-efficient wireless sensor networks," in Proceedings of the 7th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, Jul. 2001, pp. 272–287. doi: 10.1145/381677.381703.

M. T. Nguyen and K. A. Teague, "Mobile distributed compressive sensing for data collection in wireless sensor networks," in 2015 International Conference on Advanced Technologies for Communications (ATC), Oct. 2015, pp. 188–193. doi: 10.1109/ATC.2015.7388317.

A. Woo and D. E. Culler, "A transmission control scheme for media access in sensor networks," in Proceedings of the 7th annual inter-national conference on Mobile computing and networking, Jul. 2001, pp. 221–235. doi: 10.1145/381677.381699.

D. R. Raymond and S. F. Midkiff, "Denial-of-Service in Wireless Sensor Networks: Attacks and Defenses," IEEE Pervasive Comput., vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 74–81, Jan. 2008, doi: 10.1109/MPRV.2008.6.

B. Parno, A. Perrig, and V. Gligor, "Distributed Detection of Node Replication Attacks in Sensor Networks," in 2005 IEEE Sym-posium on Security and Privacy (S& P'05), 2005, pp. 49–63. doi: 10.1109/SP.2005.8.

J. Grover and S. Sharma, "Security issues in Wireless Sensor Network — A review," in 2016 5th International Conference on Reliability, Infocom Technologies and Optimization (Trends and Future Directions) (ICRITO), Sep. 2016, pp. 397–404. doi: 10.1109/ICRITO.2016.7784988.

Y.-T. Wang and R. Bagrodia, "SenSec: A Scalable and Accurate Framework for Wireless Sensor Network Security Evaluation," in 2011 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, Jun. 2011, pp. 230–239. doi: 10.1109/ICDCSW.2011.26.

A. S. K. Pathan, Hyung-Woo Lee, and Choong Seon Hong, "Security in wireless sensor networks: issues and challenges," in 2006 8th International Conference Advanced Communication Technology, 2006, pp. 6 pp. – 1048. doi: 10.1109/ICACT.2006.206151.

M. T. Nguyen and K. A. Teague, "Compressive sensing based energy-efficient random routing in wireless sensor networks," in 2014 International Conference on Advanced Technologies for Communications (ATC 2014), Oct. 2014, pp. 187–192. doi: 10.1109/ATC.2014.7043381.

H. Modares, R. Salleh, and A. Moravejosharieh, "Overview of Security Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks," in 2011 Third Interna-tional Conference on Computational Intelligence, Modelling & Simulation, Sep. 2011, pp. 308–311. doi: 10.1109/CIMSim.2011.62.

T. C. Vu, M. T. Nguyen, V. T. Nguyen, and Q. C. Le, "Approach New Framework of Compressive Sensing Based Secret Sharing in Wireless Sensor Network: Theory and Applications," in Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2024, pp. 26–34. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-50818-9_4.

J. H. Larrier, "A Brief History of Blockchain," in Transforming Scholarly Publishing With Blockchain Technologies and AI, 2021, pp. 85–100. doi: 10.4018/978-1-7998-5589-7.ch005.

A. A. Maksutov, M. S. Alexeev, N. O. Fedorova, and D. A. Andreev, "Detection of Blockchain Transactions Used in Blockchain Mixer of Coin Join Type," in 2019 IEEE Conference of Russian Young Researchers in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EIConRus), Jan. 2019, pp. 274–277. doi: 10.1109/EIConRus.2019.8656687.

A. E. Guerrero-Sanchez, E. A. Rivas-Araiza, J. L. Gonzalez-Cordoba, M. Toledano-Ayala, and A. Takacs, "Blockchain Mechanism and Symmetric Encryption in A Wireless Sensor Network," Sensors, vol. 20, no. 10, p. 2798, May 2020, doi: 10.3390/s20102798.

R. Khalid, M. W. Malik, T. A. Alghamdi, and N. Javaid, "A consortium blockchain based energy trading scheme for Electric Vehicles in smart cities," J. Inf. Secur. Appl., vol. 63, p. 102998, Dec. 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.jisa.2021.102998.

S. N. G. Gourisetti, M. Mylrea, and H. Patangia, "Evaluation and Demonstration of Blockchain Applicability Framework," IEEE Trans. Eng. Manag., vol. 67, no. 4, pp. 1142–1156, Nov. 2020, doi: 10.1109/TEM.2019.2928280.

O. Samuel and N. Javaid, "GarliChain: A privacy preserving system for smart grid consumers using blockchain," Int. J. Energy Res., vol. 46, no. 15, pp. 21643–21659, Dec. 2022, doi: 10.1002/er.7040.

İ. Gazioğlu, T. Vu Van, A. F. Büyük, T. Eren, L. A. Tuan, and C. Oana, “Real-Life Demonstration of Blockchain Based Flexibility Trading Between FSPs and DSO,” in 2023 Asia Meeting on Environment and Electrical Engineering (EEE-AM), Nov. 2023, pp. 01–05. doi: 10.1109/EEE-AM58328.2023.10395779.

Z. Zheng, S. Xie, H. Dai, X. Chen, and H. Wang, "An Overview of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus, and Future Trends," in 2017 IEEE International Congress on Big Data (BigData Congress), Jun. 2017, pp. 557–564. doi: 10.1109/BigDataCongress.2017.85.

C. V. N. U. B. Murthy, M. L. Shri, S. Kadry, and S. Lim, "Blockchain Based Cloud Computing: Architecture and Research Chal-lenges," IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 205190–205205, 2020, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3036812.

H. Pervez, M. Muneeb, M. U. Irfan, and I. U. Haq, "A Comparative Analysis of DAG-Based Blockchain Architectures," in 2018 12th International Conference on Open Source Systems and Technologies (ICOSST), Dec. 2018, pp. 27–34. doi: 10.1109/ICOSST.2018.8632193.

P. Godsiff, "Bitcoin: Bubble or Blockchain," in Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications, 2015, pp. 191–203. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-19728-9_16.

M. H. Kumar, V. Mohanraj, Y. Suresh, J. Senthilkumar, and G. Nagalalli, "Retraction Note to: Trust aware localized routing and class based dynamic block chain encryption scheme for improved security in WSN," J. Ambient Intell. Humaniz. Comput., vol. 14, no. S1, pp. 639–639, Apr. 2023, doi: 10.1007/s12652-022-04293-y.

L. Feng, H. Zhang, L. Lou, and Y. Chen, "A Blockchain-Based Collocation Storage Architecture for Data Security Process Platform of WSN," in 2018 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design ((CSCWD)), May 2018, pp. 75–80. doi: 10.1109/CSCWD.2018.8465319.

A. Kumar and A. R. Pais, "Blockchain based En-Route Filtering of False Data in Wireless Sensor Networks," in 2019 11th International Conference on Communication Systems & Networks (COMSNETS), Jan. 2019, pp. 1–6. doi: 10.1109/COMSNETS.2019.8711352.

Fan Ye, H. Luo, Songwu Lu, and Lixia Zhang, "Statistical en-route filtering of injected false data in sensor networks," IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 839–850, Apr. 2005, doi: 10.1109/JSAC.2005.843561.

X. Yang, J. Lin, W. Yu, P.-M. Moulema, X. Fu, and W. Zhao, "A Novel En-Route Filtering Scheme Against False Data Injection Attacks in Cyber-Physical Networked Systems," IEEE Trans. Comput., vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 4–18, Jan. 2015, doi: 10.1109/TC.2013.177.

H. Yang, F. Ye, Y. Yuan, S. Lu, and W. Arbaugh, "Toward resilient security in wireless sensor networks," in Proceedings of the 6th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing, May 2005, pp. 34–45. doi: 10.1145/1062689.1062696.

Kui Ren, Wenjing Lou, and Yanchao Zhang, "LEDS: Providing Location-Aware End-to-End Data Security in Wireless Sensor Networks," IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput., vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 585–598, May 2008, doi: 10.1109/TMC.2007.70753.

Sencun Zhu, S. Setia, S. Jajodia, and Peng Ning, "An interleaved hop-by-hop authentication scheme for filtering of injected false data in sensor networks," in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2004. Proceedings. 2004, pp. 259–271. doi: 10.1109/SECPRI.2004.1301328.

A. Kumar and A. R. Pais, "A New Combinatorial Design Based Data En-Route Filtering Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks," in 2018 Twenty Fourth National Conference on Communications (NCC), Feb. 2018, pp. 1–6. doi: 10.1109/NCC.2018.8600153.

H. Lazrag, A. Chehri, R. Saadane, and M. D. Rahmani, "A Blockchain-Based Approach for Optimal and Secure Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks and IoT," in 2019 15th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology & Internet-Based Systems (SITIS), Nov. 2019, pp. 411–415. doi: 10.1109/SITIS.2019.00072.

G. Ramezan and C. Leung, "A Blockchain-Based Contractual Routing Protocol for the Internet of Things Using Smart Contracts," Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput., vol. 2018, pp. 1–14, Nov. 2018, doi: 10.1155/2018/4029591.

J. Yang, S. He, Y. Xu, L. Chen, and J. Ren, "A Trusted Routing Scheme Using Blockchain and Reinforcement Learning for Wireless Sensor Networks," Sensors, vol. 19, no. 4, p. 970, Feb. 2019, doi: 10.3390/s19040970.

L. S. Sankar, M. Sindhu, and M. Sethumadhavan, "Survey of consensus protocols on blockchain applications," in 2017 4th International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communication Systems (ICACCS), Jan. 2017, pp. 1–5. doi: 10.1109/ICACCS.2017.8014672.

W. She, Q. Liu, Z. Tian, J.-S. Chen, B. Wang, and W. Liu, "Blockchain Trust Model for Malicious Node Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks," IEEE Access, vol. 7, pp. 38947–38956, 2019, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2902811.

R. Chanana, A. K. Singh, R. Killa, S. Agarwal, and P. S. Mehra, "Blockchain Based Secure Model for Sensor Data in Wireless Sensor Network," in 2020 6th International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication (ICSC), Mar. 2020, pp. 288–293. doi: 10.1109/ICSC48311.2020.9182776.

M. A. Almaiah, "A New Scheme for Detecting Malicious Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Blockchain Technology," in Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain for Future Cybersecurity Applications, 2021, pp. 217–234. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-74575-2_12.

W. Tiberti, A. Carmenini, L. Pomante, and D. Cassioli, "A Lightweight Blockchain-based Technique for Anti-Tampering in Wireless Sensor Networks," in 2020 23rd Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD), Aug. 2020, pp. 577–582. doi: 10.1109/DSD51259.2020.00095.

D. Kraft, "Difficulty control for blockchain-based consensus systems," Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl., vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 397–413, Mar. 2016, doi: 10.1007/s12083-015-0347-x.

Downloads

Published

2024-07-13

How to Cite

Nguyen, M. D., Nguyen, M. T., Vu, T. C., Ta, T. M., Tran, Q. A., & Nguyen, D. T. (2024). A Comprehensive Study on Applications of Blockchain in Wireless Sensor Networks for Security Purposes. Journal of Computing Theories and Applications, 2(1), 102–117. https://doi.org/10.62411/jcta.10486