Author(s)

S. AL-FEDAGHI

Abstract

Diagrammatic methodologies for modeling information security attacks have been developed in various forms (e.g. attack trees, use cases, and misuse cases) and applied for many purposes (e.g. security requirements specification and identification of commonly occurring attack patterns). They play an important role in the development of more effective communication between technical and nontechnical participants than that made possible by text. Recently, Unified Modeling Language (UML) sequence diagrams have been used to model security attacks (e.g. collision attacks and unintelligent replay attacks) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). WSNs require protection to preserve the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive information as well as availability of the system. This is an important research issue because WSNs are used in critical applications such as military battlefield surveillance, industrial process monitoring and control, and machine health monitoring. This paper describes an alternative flow-based approach for visualizing security attacks in terms of depiction of behavioral interactions. It models security attacks in WSNs and contrasts this method with the sequence-based diagrammatic method. The comparison provides an initial appraisal of the technique with reference to a well-known process modeling methodology. The results indicate that the method can capture the interweaving of attack events to achieve a more complete and detailed picture necessary for better understanding.

Keywords

Collision attacks, conceptual model, information security, security requirements, UML sequence diagram, visualization, wireless sensor networks