1,507 research outputs found
A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in
the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed
nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks
are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their
proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed
for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield.
Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios.
Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security
mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible
in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging
task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms
for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures
presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN
security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table
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
Fully leakage-resilient signatures revisited: Graceful degradation, noisy leakage, and construction in the bounded-retrieval model
We construct new leakage-resilient signature schemes. Our schemes remain unforgeable against an adversary leaking arbitrary (yet bounded) information on the entire state of the signer (sometimes known as fully leakage resilience), including the random coin tosses of the signing algorithm. The main feature of our constructions is that they offer a graceful degradation of security in situations where standard existential unforgeability is impossible
A Secure Traitor Tracing Scheme against Key Exposure
Copyright protection is a major issue in distributing digital content. On the
other hand, improvements to usability are sought by content users. In this
paper, we propose a secure {\it traitor tracing scheme against key exposure
(TTaKE)} which contains the properties of both a traitor tracing scheme and a
forward secure public key cryptosystem. Its structure fits current digital
broadcasting systems and it may be useful in preventing traitors from making
illegal decoders and in minimizing the damage from accidental key exposure. It
can improve usability through these properties.Comment: 5 pages, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 2005
(ISIT 2005
Self-healing in unattended wireless sensor networks
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) appeal to a wide range of applications that involve the monitoring of various physical phenomena. However, WSNs are subject to many threats. In particular, lack of pervasive tamper-resistant hardware results in sensors being easy targets for compromise. Having compromised a sensor, the adversary learns all the sensor secrets, allowing it to later encrypt/decrypt or authenticate messages on behalf of that sensor. This threat is particularly relevant in the novel unattended wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) scenario. UWSNs operate without constant supervision by a trusted sink. UWSN?s unattended nature and increased exposure to attacks prompts the need for special techniques geared towards regaining security after being compromised. In this article, we investigate cooperative self-healing in UWSNs and propose various techniques to allow unattended sensors to recover security after compromise. Our techniques provide seamless healing rates even against a very agile and powerful adversary. The effectiveness and viability of our proposed techniques are assessed by thorough analysis and supported by simulation results. Finally, we introduce some real-world issues affecting UWSN deployment and provide some solutions for them as well as a few open problems calling for further investigation
Input-shrinking functions: theory and application
In this thesis, we contribute to the emerging field of the Leakage-Resilient Cryptography by studying the problem of secure data storage on hardware that may
leak information, introducing a new primitive, a leakage-resilient storage, and showing two different constructions of such storage scheme provably secure against a class of
leakage functions that can depend only on some restricted part of the memory and against a class of computationally weak leakage functions, e.g. functions computable by small circuits,
respectively.
Our results come with instantiations and analysis of concrete parameters.
Furthermore, as second contribution, we present our implementation in C programming language, using the cryptographic library of the OpenSSL project, of a two-party Authenticated Key
Exchange (AKE) protocol, which allows a client and a server, who share a huge secret file, to securely compute a shared key, providing client-to-server authentication, also in the presence of active attackers.
Following the work of Cash et al. (TCC 2007), we based our construction on a Weak Key Exchange (WKE) protocol, developed in the BRM, and a Password-based Authenticated Key
Exchange (PAKE) protocol secure in the Universally Composable (UC) framework.
The WKE protocol showed by Cash et al. uses an explicit construction of averaging sampler, which uses less random bits than the random choice but does not seem to be
efficiently implementable in practice.
In this thesis, we propose a WKE protocol similar but simpler than that one of Cash et al.: our protocol uses more randomness than the Cash et al.'s one, as it simply uses random
choice instead of averaging sampler, but we are able to show an efficient implementation of it.
Moreover, we formally adapt the security analysis of the WKE protocol of Cash et al. to our WKE protocol.
To complete our AKE protocol, we implement the PAKE protocol showed secure in the UC framework by Abdalla et al. (CT-RSA 2008), which is more efficient than the Canetti et al.'s UC-PAKE protocol (EuroCrypt 2005) used in Cash et al.'s work.
In our implementation of the WKE protocol, to achieve small constant communication complexity and amount of randomness, we rely on the Random Oracle (RO) model.
However, we would like to note that in our implementation of the AKE protocol we need also a UC-PAKE protocol which already relies on RO, as it is impossible to achieve UC-PAKE in the
standard model.
In our work we focus not only on the theoretical aspects of the area, providing formal models and proofs, but also on the practical ones, analyzing instantiations, concrete parameters
and implementation of the proposed solutions, to contribute to bridge the gap between theory and practice in this field
Routing Security Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks: Attacks and Defenses
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are rapidly emerging as an important new area
in wireless and mobile computing research. Applications of WSNs are numerous
and growing, and range from indoor deployment scenarios in the home and office
to outdoor deployment scenarios in adversary's territory in a tactical
battleground (Akyildiz et al., 2002). For military environment, dispersal of
WSNs into an adversary's territory enables the detection and tracking of enemy
soldiers and vehicles. For home/office environments, indoor sensor networks
offer the ability to monitor the health of the elderly and to detect intruders
via a wireless home security system. In each of these scenarios, lives and
livelihoods may depend on the timeliness and correctness of the sensor data
obtained from dispersed sensor nodes. As a result, such WSNs must be secured to
prevent an intruder from obstructing the delivery of correct sensor data and
from forging sensor data. To address the latter problem, end-to-end data
integrity checksums and post-processing of senor data can be used to identify
forged sensor data (Estrin et al., 1999; Hu et al., 2003a; Ye et al., 2004).
The focus of this chapter is on routing security in WSNs. Most of the currently
existing routing protocols for WSNs make an optimization on the limited
capabilities of the nodes and the application-specific nature of the network,
but do not any the security aspects of the protocols. Although these protocols
have not been designed with security as a goal, it is extremely important to
analyze their security properties. When the defender has the liabilities of
insecure wireless communication, limited node capabilities, and possible
insider threats, and the adversaries can use powerful laptops with high energy
and long range communication to attack the network, designing a secure routing
protocol for WSNs is obviously a non-trivial task.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables 4. arXiv admin note: substantial text
overlap with arXiv:1011.152
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