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

Storing IOT Data Securely in a Private Ethereum Blockchain

Internet of Things (IoT) is a set of technologies that enable network-connected devices to perform an action or share data among several connected devices or to a shared database. The actions can be anything from switching on an Air Conditioning device remotely to turning on the ignition of a car through a command issued from a remote location or asking Alexa or Google Assistant to search for weather conditions in an area. IoT has proved to be game-changing for many industries such as Supply Chain, Shipping and Transportation providing updates on the status of shipments in real time. This has resulted in a huge amount of data created by a lot of these devices all of which need to be processed in real time. In this thesis, we propose a method to collect sensor data from IoT devices and use blockchain to store and retrieve the collected data in a secure and decentralized fashion within a closed system, suitable for a single enterprise or a group of companies in industries like shipping where sharing data with each other is required. Much like blockchain, we envision a future where IoT devices can connect and disconnect to distributed systems without causing downtime for the data collection or storage or relying on a cloud-based storage system for synchronizing data between devices. We also look at how the performance of some of these distributed systems like Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) and Ethereum Swarm compare on low-powered devices like the raspberry pi

The Meeting of Acquaintances: A Cost-efficient Authentication Scheme for Light-weight Objects with Transient Trust Level and Plurality Approach

Wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of distributed sensor nodes so that potential risks are becoming more and more unpredictable. The new entrants pose the potential risks when they move into the secure zone. To build a door wall that provides safe and secured for the system, many recent research works applied the initial authentication process. However, the majority of the previous articles only focused on the Central Authority (CA) since this leads to an increase in the computation cost and energy consumption for the specific cases on the Internet of Things (IoT). Hence, in this article, we will lessen the importance of these third parties through proposing an enhanced authentication mechanism that includes key management and evaluation based on the past interactions to assist the objects joining a secured area without any nearby CA. We refer to a mobility dataset from CRAWDAD collected at the University Politehnica of Bucharest and rebuild into a new random dataset larger than the old one. The new one is an input for a simulated authenticating algorithm to observe the communication cost and resource usage of devices. Our proposal helps the authenticating flexible, being strict with unknown devices into the secured zone. The threshold of maximum friends can modify based on the optimization of the symmetric-key algorithm to diminish communication costs (our experimental results compare to previous schemes less than 2000 bits) and raise flexibility in resource-constrained environments.Comment: 27 page

Secure service proxy : a CoAP(s) intermediary for a securer and smarter web of things

As the IoT continues to grow over the coming years, resource-constrained devices and networks will see an increase in traffic as everything is connected in an open Web of Things. The performance- and function-enhancing features are difficult to provide in resource-constrained environments, but will gain importance if the WoT is to be scaled up successfully. For example, scalable open standards-based authentication and authorization will be important to manage access to the limited resources of constrained devices and networks. Additionally, features such as caching and virtualization may help further reduce the load on these constrained systems. This work presents the Secure Service Proxy (SSP): a constrained-network edge proxy with the goal of improving the performance and functionality of constrained RESTful environments. Our evaluations show that the proposed design reaches its goal by reducing the load on constrained devices while implementing a wide range of features as different adapters. Specifically, the results show that the SSP leads to significant savings in processing, network traffic, network delay and packet loss rates for constrained devices. As a result, the SSP helps to guarantee the proper operation of constrained networks as these networks form an ever-expanding Web of Things

C-FLAT: Control-FLow ATtestation for Embedded Systems Software

Remote attestation is a crucial security service particularly relevant to increasingly popular IoT (and other embedded) devices. It allows a trusted party (verifier) to learn the state of a remote, and potentially malware-infected, device (prover). Most existing approaches are static in nature and only check whether benign software is initially loaded on the prover. However, they are vulnerable to run-time attacks that hijack the application's control or data flow, e.g., via return-oriented programming or data-oriented exploits. As a concrete step towards more comprehensive run-time remote attestation, we present the design and implementation of Control- FLow ATtestation (C-FLAT) that enables remote attestation of an application's control-flow path, without requiring the source code. We describe a full prototype implementation of C-FLAT on Raspberry Pi using its ARM TrustZone hardware security extensions. We evaluate C-FLAT's performance using a real-world embedded (cyber-physical) application, and demonstrate its efficacy against control-flow hijacking attacks.Comment: Extended version of article to appear in CCS '16 Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Securit

Cryptocurrencies Are Taxable and Not Free From Fraud

In this report, the authors discuss cryptocurrencies — especially bitcoin — and argue that because the IRS lists them as property, they are taxable, and because they are not as anonymous as once thought, they are not free from fraud. Cryptocurrencies are digital assets used as a medium of exchange, but they are not really coins. They can be sent electronically from one entity to another almost anywhere in the world with an internet connection. There are many cryptocurrencies in the market, including bitcoin, ethereum, ethereum classic, litecoin, nem, dash, iota, bitshares, monero, neo, and ripple. Many of the cryptocurrency networks are not controlled by a single entity or company; instead, a decentralized network of computers keeps track of the currency using a token ID. A ledger maintains a continuously growing list of date stamped transactions in real time called “blocks.” This technology is known as blockchain, which records, verifies, and stores transactions without a trusted central authority. The network instead relies on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) with uncertain legal standing

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

Droplet: Decentralized Authorization for IoT Data Streams

This paper presents Droplet, a decentralized data access control service, which operates without intermediate trust entities. Droplet enables data owners to securely and selectively share their encrypted data while guaranteeing data confidentiality against unauthorized parties. Droplet's contribution lies in coupling two key ideas: (i) a new cryptographically-enforced access control scheme for encrypted data streams that enables users to define fine-grained stream-specific access policies, and (ii) a decentralized authorization service that handles user-defined access policies. In this paper, we present Droplet's design, the reference implementation of Droplet, and experimental results of three case-study apps atop of Droplet: Fitbit activity tracker, Ava health tracker, and ECOviz smart meter dashboard