A Comprehensive Review of Malware Detection Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Over the past few years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been increasingly deployed for numerous sensing and monitoring purposes in environmental monitoring, industrial automation, health monitoring, military surveillance, smart agriculture and disaster management among others. The inherent limitations in terms of processing power, memory, communication bandwidth and energy of sensor nodes make WSNs highly susceptible to malware attacks. A wide variety of malware such as sensor network worms, Trojans, viruses, botnets and ransomware can easily propagate in a network through inter node communication. Such malware can cause serious damage to communication, compromise sensitive data, consume energy of the infected nodes thereby reducing the lifetime of network among others. In the last decade, numerous approaches have been proposed for the detection of malware infecting sensor nodes. These approaches range from traditional signature-based detection and behavior-based detection to more advanced approaches such as machine learning (ML)-based, deep learning (DL) -based, blockchain-based, trust management-based and federated learning-based detection. Most of the existing approaches for malware detection in WSNs have been designed to work on WSNs and have not been tested on real scenarios. Most of the approaches have their own strengths and weaknesses and the most suitable approach for a given application depends on various factors. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of approaches for the detection of malware infecting sensor nodes in WSNs. We present a taxonomy of reviewed approaches for detection of malware. We also present a discussion on approaches for modeling malware propagation in a WSN as well as review on various categories of malware that have been designed to attack sensor nodes in WSNs along with detection frameworks for different categories of malware. We also present a comparative study of approaches used for the detection of malware in WSNs on the basis of various parameters such as detection accuracy, computational complexity, energy efficiency, scalability, detection latency and deployability. The review and taxonomy presented in this paper will be highly beneficial for researchers and practitioners designing approaches and systems for the detection of malware in WSNs. Various open research challenges in this area have also been discussed in this paper including detection of zero-day malware, designing of intelligent models to be light enough to be deployed on sensor nodes, use of explainable artificial intelligence for detection of malware in WSNs, designing approaches for privacy-preserving collaborative learning in WSNs and designing adaptive security approaches for WSNs.