Worm Propagation Dynamics in Wireless Sensor Networks

Worms have become an emergent threat towards information confidentiality, integrity, and service availability. While playing an important role for people to interact with surrounding environments, wireless sensor networks suffer from growing security concerns posed by worms because of sensor networks´ low physical security, lack of resilience and robustness of underlying operating systems, and the ever increased complexity of deployed applications. In this paper, we study worm propagation in 802.15.4 based wireless sensor networks. First we present a baseline worm model in the context of wireless sensor networks. Then we describe a preliminary study of the impact of various protocol parameters and network scenarios on worm propagation dynamics. Our simulation study can provide insight into deriving a suitable model to characterize worm propagation in sensor networks.