Wireless sensor network security visualization

Security is becoming a major concern for many mission-critical applications wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are envisaged to support. This is because WSNs are susceptible to various types of attacks or to node compromises that exploit known and unknown vulnerabilities of protocols, software and hardware, and threaten the security, integrity, authenticity, and availability of data that resides in these networked systems. While various security mechanisms have been proposed for these networks dealing with either MAC layer or network layer security issues, or key management problems, the security benefits that can be obtained from an upper visualization layer have not been adequately considered in their design. In this paper, we explore the issues and concerns surrounding the application of visual analysis for wireless sensor network security purposes. This paper focuses on several distinct advantages information visualization and visual analytics can offer in the security domain. In addition, this paper reviews security visualization tools that are available to network security analysts. Finally, it concludes by identifying challenges for this new area of research.