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

Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Issues and Challenges

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging technology that shows great promise for various futuristic applications both for mass public and military. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it lucrative for being exploited in abundance in future. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also incurs various types of security threats. The intent of this paper is to investigate the security related issues and challenges in wireless sensor networks. We identify the security threats, review proposed security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks. We also discuss the holistic view of security for ensuring layered and robust security in wireless sensor networks.Comment: 6 page

QUANTUM PHASE SHIFT FOR ENERGY CONSERVED SECURED DATA COMMUNICATION IN MANET

A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network(MANET) is a structure-less network where the mobile nodes randomly moved in any direction within the transmission range of the network. Due to this mobility, wide range of intrusion occurs in MANET. Therefore, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are significant in MANETs to identify the malicious behavior. In order to improve the secured data communication an efficient Quantum Phase Shift Energy Conserved Data Security (QPSEC-DS) technique is introduced. The Quantum Phase Shift (QPS) technique is used for ensuring the security during the data transmission from sender to receiver in MANET. Initially, the quantum based approach is used to encrypt the information using QPS at the sender through secret key distribution. The receiver side also performs the same QPS, and then the encrypted bit is received successfully. This in turns attains the secured packet transmission without any malicious node in the MANET. Based on the phase shifting, the energy conservation between the sender and receiver is measured for transmitting the data packet using QPSEC-DS technique. Also, the enhanced Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol is applied in QPSEC-DS technique is implemented to improve the energy management and secured data communication between the source and destination in an efficient manner. The QPSEC-DS technique conducts the simulations work on parameters including packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, communication overhead and end to end delay

From 6LoWPAN to 6Lo: expanding the universe of IPv6-supported technologies for the Internet of Things

© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksLeveraging 6LoWPAN, the IETF 6Lo Working Group has targeted adaptation of IPv6 over a new generation of communication technologies for the IoT. These comprise Bluetooth LE, ITU-T G.9959, DECT ULE, MS/TP, NFC, IEEE 1901.2, and IEEE 802.11ah. This article comprehensively analyzes the 6Lo technologies and adaptation layers, giving the motivation for critical design decisions, highlighting crucial aspects for performance, and presenting main challenges.Postprint (author's final draft

Efficient Packet-Drop Thwarting and User-Privacy Preserving Protocols for Multi-hop Wireless Networks

In multi-hop wireless network (MWN), the mobile nodes relay others’ packets for enabling new applications and enhancing the network deployment and performance. However, the selfish nodes drop the packets because packet relay consumes their resources without benefits, and the malicious nodes drop the packets to launch Denial-of-Service attacks. Packet drop attacks adversely degrade the network fairness and performance in terms of throughput, delay, and packet delivery ratio. Moreover, due to the nature of wireless transmission and multi-hop packet relay, the attackers can analyze the network traffic in undetectable way to learn the users’ locations in number of hops and their communication activities causing a serious threat to the users’ privacy. In this thesis, we propose efficient security protocols for thwarting packet drop attacks and preserving users’ privacy in multi-hop wireless networks. First, we design a fair and efficient cooperation incentive protocol to stimulate the selfish nodes to relay others’ packets. The source and the destination nodes pay credits (or micropayment) to the intermediate nodes for relaying their packets. In addition to cooperation stimulation, the incentive protocol enforces fairness by rewarding credits to compensate the nodes for the consumed resources in relaying others’ packets. The protocol also discourages launching Resource-Exhaustion attacks by sending bogus packets to exhaust the intermediate nodes’ resources because the nodes pay for relaying their packets. For fair charging policy, both the source and the destination nodes are charged when the two nodes benefit from the communication. Since micropayment protocols have been originally proposed for web-based applications, we propose a practical payment model specifically designed for MWNs to consider the significant differences between web-based applications and cooperation stimulation. Although the non-repudiation property of the public-key cryptography is essential for securing the incentive protocol, the public-key cryptography requires too complicated computations and has a long signature tag. For efficient implementation, we use the public-key cryptography only for the first packet in a series and use the efficient hashing operations for the next packets, so that the overhead of the packet series converges to that of the hashing operations. Since a trusted party is not involved in the communication sessions, the nodes usually submit undeniable digital receipts (proofs of packet relay) to a centralized trusted party for updating their credit accounts. Instead of submitting large-size payment receipts, the nodes submit brief reports containing the alleged charges and rewards and store undeniable security evidences. The payment of the fair reports can be cleared with almost no processing overhead. For the cheating reports, the evidences are requested to identify and evict the cheating nodes. Since the cheating actions are exceptional, the proposed protocol can significantly reduce the required bandwidth and energy for submitting the payment data and clear the payment with almost no processing overhead while achieving the same security strength as the receipt-based protocols. Second, the payment reports are processed to extract financial information to reward the cooperative nodes, and contextual information such as the broken links to build up a trust system to measure the nodes’ packet-relay success ratios in terms of trust values. A node’s trust value is degraded whenever it does not relay a packet and improved whenever it does. A node is identified as malicious and excluded from the network once its trust value reaches to a threshold. Using trust system is necessary to keep track of the nodes’ long-term behaviors because the network packets may be dropped normally, e.g., due to mobility, or temporarily, e.g., due to network congestion, but the high frequency of packet drop is an obvious misbehavior. Then, we propose a trust-based and energy-aware routing protocol to route traffics through the highly trusted nodes having sufficient residual energy in order to establish stable routes and thus minimize the probability of route breakage. A node’s trust value is a real and live measurement to the node’s failure probability and mobility level, i.e., the low-mobility nodes having large hardware resources can perform packet relay more efficiently. In this way, the proposed protocol stimulates the nodes not only to cooperate but also to improve their packet-relay success ratio and tell the truth about their residual energy to improve their trust values and thus raise their chances to participate in future routes. Finally, we propose a privacy-preserving routing and incentive protocol for hybrid ad hoc wireless network. Micropayment is used to stimulate the nodes’ cooperation without submitting payment receipts. We only use the lightweight hashing and symmetric-key-cryptography operations to preserve the users’ privacy. The nodes’ pseudonyms are efficiently computed using hashing operations. Only trusted parties can link these pseudonyms to the real identities for charging and rewarding operations. Moreover, our protocol protects the location privacy of the anonymous source and destination nodes. Extensive analysis and simulations demonstrate that our protocols can secure the payment and trust calculation, preserve the users’ privacy with acceptable overhead, and precisely identify the malicious and the cheating nodes. Moreover, the simulation and measurement results demonstrate that our routing protocols can significantly improve route stability and thus the packet delivery ratio due to stimulating the selfish nodes’ cooperation, evicting the malicious nodes, and making informed decisions regarding route selection. In addition, the processing and submitting overheads of the payment-reports are incomparable with those of the receipts in the receipt-based incentive protocols. Our protocol also requires incomparable overhead to the signature-based protocols because the lightweight hashing operations dominate the nodes’ operations

Improved Internet Security Protocols Using Cryptographic One-Way Hash Chains

In this dissertation, new approaches that utilize the one-way cryptographic hash functions in designing improved network security protocols are investigated. The proposed approaches are designed to be scalable and easy to implement in modern technology. The first contribution explores session cookies with emphasis on the threat of session hijacking attacks resulting from session cookie theft or sniffing. In the proposed scheme, these cookies are replaced by easily computed authentication credentials using Lamport\u27s well-known one-time passwords. The basic idea in this scheme revolves around utilizing sparse caching units, where authentication credentials pertaining to cookies are stored and fetched once needed, thereby, mitigating computational overhead generally associated with one-way hash constructions. The second and third proposed schemes rely on dividing the one-way hash construction into a hierarchical two-tier construction. Each tier component is responsible for some aspect of authentication generated by using two different hash functions. By utilizing different cryptographic hash functions arranged in two tiers, the hierarchical two-tier protocol (our second contribution) gives significant performance improvement over previously proposed solutions for securing Internet cookies. Through indexing authentication credentials by their position within the hash chain in a multi-dimensional chain, the third contribution achieves improved performance. In the fourth proposed scheme, an attempt is made to apply the one-way hash construction to achieve user and broadcast authentication in wireless sensor networks. Due to known energy and memory constraints, the one-way hash scheme is modified to mitigate computational overhead so it can be easily applied in this particular setting. The fifth scheme tries to reap the benefits of the sparse cache-supported scheme and the hierarchical scheme. The resulting hybrid approach achieves efficient performance at the lowest cost of caching possible. In the sixth proposal, an authentication scheme tailored for the multi-server single sign-on (SSO) environment is presented. The scheme utilizes the one-way hash construction in a Merkle Hash Tree and a hash calendar to avoid impersonation and session hijacking attacks. The scheme also explores the optimal configuration of the one-way hash chain in this particular environment. All the proposed protocols are validated by extensive experimental analyses. These analyses are obtained by running simulations depicting the many scenarios envisioned. Additionally, these simulations are supported by relevant analytical models derived by mathematical formulas taking into consideration the environment under investigation

Relaying in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

The deployment of relays between Internet of Things (IoT) end devices and gateways can improve link quality. In cellular-based IoT, relays have the potential to reduce base station overload. The energy expended in single-hop long-range communication can be reduced if relays listen to transmissions of end devices and forward these observations to gateways. However, incorporating relays into IoT networks faces some challenges. IoT end devices are designed primarily for uplink communication of small-sized observations toward the network; hence, opportunistically using end devices as relays needs a redesign of both the medium access control (MAC) layer protocol of such end devices and possible addition of new communication interfaces. Additionally, the wake-up time of IoT end devices needs to be synchronized with that of the relays. For cellular-based IoT, the possibility of using infrastructure relays exists, and noncellular IoT networks can leverage the presence of mobile devices for relaying, for example, in remote healthcare. However, the latter presents problems of incentivizing relay participation and managing the mobility of relays. Furthermore, although relays can increase the lifetime of IoT networks, deploying relays implies the need for additional batteries to power them. This can erode the energy efficiency gain that relays offer. Therefore, designing relay-assisted IoT networks that provide acceptable trade-offs is key, and this goes beyond adding an extra transmit RF chain to a relay-enabled IoT end device. There has been increasing research interest in IoT relaying, as demonstrated in the available literature. Works that consider these issues are surveyed in this paper to provide insight into the state of the art, provide design insights for network designers and motivate future research directions