Secure Identification in Social Wireless Networks

The applications based on social networking have brought revolution towards social life and are continuously gaining popularity among the Internet users. Due to the advanced computational resources offered by the innovative hardware and nominal subscriber charges of network operators, most of the online social networks are transforming into the mobile domain by offering exciting applications and games exclusively designed for users on the go. Moreover, the mobile devices are considered more personal as compared to their desktop rivals, so there is a tendency among the mobile users to store sensitive data like contacts, passwords, bank account details, updated calendar entries with key dates and personal notes on their devices. The Project Social Wireless Network Secure Identification (SWIN) is carried out at Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) to explore the practicality of providing the secure mobile social networking portal with advanced security features to tackle potential security threats by extending the existing methods with more innovative security technologies. In addition to the extensive background study and the determination of marketable use-cases with their corresponding security requirements, this thesis proposes a secure identification design to satisfy the security dimensions for both online and offline peers. We have implemented an initial prototype using PHP Socket and OpenSSL library to simulate the secure identification procedure based on the proposed design. The design is in compliance with 3GPP‟s Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA) and our implementation has demonstrated the flexibility of the solution to be applied independently for the applications requiring secure identification. Finally, the thesis provides strong foundation for the advanced implementation on mobile platform in future

Inter-Domain Authentication for Seamless Roaming in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The convergence of diverse but complementary wireless access technologies and inter-operation among administrative domains have been envisioned as crucial for the next generation wireless networks that will provide support for end-user devices to seamlessly roam across domain boundaries. The integration of existing and emerging heterogeneous wireless networks to provide such seamless roaming requires the design of a handover scheme that provides uninterrupted service continuity while facilitating the establishment of authenticity of the entities involved. The existing protocols for supporting re-authentication of a mobile node during a handover across administrative domains typically involve several round trips to the home domain, and hence introduce long latencies. Furthermore, the existing methods for negotiating roaming agreements to establish inter-domain trust rely on a lengthy manual process, thus, impeding seamless roaming across multiple domains in a truly heterogeneous wireless network. In this thesis, we present a new proof-token based authentication protocol that supports quick re-authentication of a mobile node as it moves to a new foreign domain without involving communication with the home domain. The proposed proof-token based protocol can also support establishment of spontaneous roaming agreements between a pair of domains that do not already have a direct roaming agreement, thus allowing flexible business models to be supported. We describe details of the new authentication architecture, the proposed protocol, which is based on EAP-TLS and compare the proposed protocol with existing protocols

PKI Safety Net (PKISN): Addressing the Too-Big-to-Be-Revoked Problem of the TLS Ecosystem

In a public-key infrastructure (PKI), clients must have an efficient and secure way to determine whether a certificate was revoked (by an entity considered as legitimate to do so), while preserving user privacy. A few certification authorities (CAs) are currently responsible for the issuance of the large majority of TLS certificates. These certificates are considered valid only if the certificate of the issuing CA is also valid. The certificates of these important CAs are effectively too big to be revoked, as revoking them would result in massive collateral damage. To solve this problem, we redesign the current revocation system with a novel approach that we call PKI Safety Net (PKISN), which uses publicly accessible logs to store certificates (in the spirit of Certificate Transparency) and revocations. The proposed system extends existing mechanisms, which enables simple deployment. Moreover, we present a complete implementation and evaluation of our scheme.Comment: IEEE EuroS&P 201

Trusted Execution Development: Designing a Secure, High-Performance Remote Attestation Protocol

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) are a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technology that allow programs to protect execution process and data from other processes on the platform. We propose a method to combine SGX attestation with Transport Layer Security (TLS). Doing so will combine guarantees about the program, runtime environment, and machine identity into a normal TLS handshake. We implemented a basic server using SGX/TLS and provide performance details and lessons learned during development

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocols for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation wireless networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to service providers. As WMNs become an increasingly popular replacement technology for last-mile connectivity to the home networking, community and neighborhood networking, it is imperative to design efficient and secure communication protocols for these networks. However, several vulnerabilities exist in currently existing protocols for WMNs. These security loopholes can be exploited by potential attackers to launch attack on WMNs. The absence of a central point of administration makes securing WMNs even more challenging. The broadcast nature of transmission and the dependency on the intermediate nodes for multi-hop communications lead to several security vulnerabilities in WMNs. The attacks can be external as well as internal in nature. External attacks are launched by intruders who are not authorized users of the network. For example, an intruding node may eavesdrop on the packets and replay those packets at a later point of time to gain access to the network resources. On the other hand, the internal attacks are launched by the nodes that are part of the WMN. On example of such attack is an intermediate node dropping packets which it was supposed to forward. This chapter presents a comprehensive discussion on the current authentication and privacy protection schemes for WMN. In addition, it proposes a novel security protocol for node authentication and message confidentiality and an anonymization scheme for privacy protection of users in WMNs.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures. The work is an extended version of the author's previous works submitted in CoRR: arXiv:1107.5538v1 and arXiv:1102.1226v

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio