On Simulative Analysis of Attack Impact in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are frequently adopted in industrial applications. However, they are par-ticularly prone to cyber-physical attacks. Since address-ing all possible attacks is not viable, due to performance and economic reasons, it is vital to choose which attacks to address and which countermeasures to adopt. Hence, a quantitative analysis of attack impact is crucial to make an effective choice. In this paper, we present a simulative approach to attack impact analysis, and show that simula-tion results provide valuable insights on the attack sever-ity. To fix ideas, we refer to a WSN monitoring pollutant emissions of a critical infrastructure. We analyze effects of cyber-physical attacks against the network, and rank them according to their impact severity. This supports de-signers in deciding which attacks to address and which countermeasures to select. 1