![](bg4.png)
to their mutual dependency relations, and makes
them act under the common defined security poli-
cies. Thus, the security related information can be
presented to the security administrator by a single
interface.
• Local Response & Global Awareness Sec-SNMP
agents respond to security events locally and
in time, while collaborations among these dis-
tributed agents are still possible through Sec-
SNMP manager, which can be accessed by all
agents and is globally situation aware.
4 RELATED WORK
Louis Lee et al. (Lee et al., 2006) propose an
adaptive policy-based management system for sen-
sor networks, called Wireless Sensor Network Man-
agement System (WinMS). The end user predefines
management parameter thresholds on sensor nodes
that are used as event triggers, and specifies man-
agement tasks to be executed when the events oc-
cur. WinMS uses its underlying MAC and routing
protocol FlexiMAC, which is a TDMA-based pro-
tocol that provides synchronized communication, to
support resource (time slots) transfer from the rest of
the network to areas where important sensing events
are detected. MANNA (a Management Architecture
for Wireless Sensor Networks) (Ruiz et al., 2003),
is another policy-based management system that col-
lects dynamic management information, maps this
into WSN models, and executes management func-
tions and services based on WSN models. WSN mod-
els maintain the information about the state of the net-
work. MANNA defines the relationship among WSN
models in a Management Information Base (MIB). It
has been shown (Ruiz et al., 2004) that fault manage-
ment aiming to detect failures in WSNs can be easily
performed by analyzing WSN models within the ar-
chitecture of MANNA. Unfortunately, both WinMS
and MANNA are proposed for general network man-
agement, and the solution of security management
cannot be provided by WinMS and MANNA in a
straight-forward way. However, we found that Sec-
SNMP has a good compatibility with them, thus
Sec-SNMP can be integrated into the existing net-
work mangement frameworks for security manage-
ment purpose.
Coming to the research attempts in the special area
of security management, ref. (Misic et al., 2007) ad-
dresses the networking and security architecture of a
healthcare information system which includes a wire-
less hop. This hop includes wireless sensor networks
and, possibly, wireless local area or mesh networks
to connect to the main wired hospital network. The
authors discuss confidentiality and integrity policies
for clinical information systems and propose the fea-
sible enforcement mechanisms over the wireless hop.
They also compare two candidate MAC technologies,
IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.1, from the aspect of
resilience to jamming and denial-of-service attacks.
Compared to Sec-SNMP proposed in this paper, the
solution proposed in (Misic et al., 2007) is too spe-
cialized and not appropriate for the security manage-
ment of a general purpose wireless sensor network.
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
Security management is the process of managing,
monitoring, and controlling the security related be-
haviors of a network, and it plays a vital important
role in network management. Currently, a few at-
tentions have been paid on general network manage-
ment for sensor networks, with fewer papers specif-
ically discussing security management. This paper
presents a policy-based sensor network security man-
agement framework called Sec-SNMP, which spec-
ifies the necessary important components and func-
tionalities in a sensor network security management
system. To the best knowledge of the authors, this pa-
per is within the earliest works in the important sensor
network security management area.
Although the framework of sensor network se-
curity management has been presented in this pa-
per, there exist open problems to implement it. One
challenge is to make clear the dependency relations
among different proposed security technologies and
design appropriate interfaces among them. Another
challenge could be the development of expressive
languages or metadata for representing management
policies and for representing the MIBs that can be un-
derstood by the security agent application, the secu-
rity manager application, and the security administra-
tor.
REFERENCES
Almajali, S., Elrad, T., 2006. Remote dynamic policy de-
ployment for sensor networks using application trans-
parent approach. In OOPSLA ’06, Workshop on Build-
ing Software for Sensor Networks.
Lee, W.L., Datta, A., Cardell-Oliver, R., 2006. WinMS:
wireless sensor network-management system, an
adaptive policy-based management for wireless sen-
SEC-SNMP: POLICY-BASED SECURITY MANAGEMENT FOR SENSOR NETWORKS
225