A null space-based MAC scheme against pollution attacks to random linear network coding

Network Coding has significantly shown the achievable throughput and robustness in wireless Networks. However, network coding-enabled networks are susceptible to pollution attacks where a small number of polluted messages will propagate due to recoding and corrupt bunches of legitimate messages. Several lightweight Homomorphic Message Authentication Code (HMAC) schemes have been proposed for protecting the transmitted data against pollution attacks; however, most of them are not appropriate for wireless networks or cannot resist tag pollution attacks. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient null space-based homomorphic MAC scheme, for network coding-enabled wireless networks. The proposed scheme makes use of two types of tags (i.e., MACs and D-MACs) to provide resistance against data pollution and tag pollution attacks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that due to its lightweight nature, our proposed scheme incurs a minimal complexity compared to other related schemes

Secure location-aware communications in energy-constrained wireless networks

Wireless ad hoc network has enabled a variety of exciting civilian, industrial and military applications over the past few years. Among the many types of wireless ad hoc networks, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has gained popularity because of the technology development for manufacturing low-cost, low-power, multi-functional motes. Compared with traditional wireless network, location-aware communication is a very common communication pattern and is required by many applications in WSNs. For instance, in the geographical routing protocol, a sensor needs to know its own and its neighbors\u27 locations to forward a packet properly to the next hop. The application-aware communications are vulnerable to many malicious attacks, ranging from passive eavesdropping to active spoofing, jamming, replaying, etc. Although research efforts have been devoted to secure communications in general, the properties of energy-constrained networks pose new technical challenges: First, the communicating nodes in the network are always unattended for long periods without physical maintenance, which makes their energy a premier resource. Second, the wireless devices usually have very limited hardware resources such as memory, computation capacity and communication range. Third, the number of nodes can be potentially of very high magnitude. Therefore, it is infeasible to utilize existing secure algorithms designed for conventional wireless networks, and innovative mechanisms should be designed in a way that can conserve power consumption, use inexpensive hardware and lightweight protocols, and accommodate with the scalability of the network. In this research, we aim at constructing a secure location-aware communication system for energy-constrained wireless network, and we take wireless sensor network as a concrete research scenario. Particularly, we identify three important problems as our research targets: (1) providing correct location estimations for sensors in presence of wormhole attacks and pollution attacks, (2) detecting location anomalies according to the application-specific requirements of the verification accuracy, and (3) preventing information leakage to eavesdroppers when using network coding for multicasting location information. Our contributions of the research are as follows: First, we propose two schemes to improve the availability and accuracy of location information of nodes. Then, we study monitoring and detection techniques and propose three lightweight schemes to detect location anomalies. Finally, we propose two network coding schemes which can effectively prevent information leakage to eavesdroppers. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our schemes in enhancing security of the system. Compared to previous works, our schemes are more lightweight in terms of hardware cost, computation overhead and communication consumptions, and thus are suitable for energy-constrained wireless networks

An efficient null space-based Homomorphic MAC scheme against tag pollution attacks in RLNC

This letter proposes an efficient null space-based homomorphic message authentication code scheme providing resistance against tag pollution attacks in random linear network coding, where these attacks constitute a severe security threat. In contrast to data pollution attacks, where an adversary injects into the network corrupted packets, in tag pollution attacks the adversary corrupts (i.e. pollutes) tags appended to the end of the coded packets to prevent the destination nodes from decoding correctly. Our results show that the proposed scheme is more efficient compared to other competitive tag pollution immune schemes in terms of computational complexity

IDLP: an efficient intrusion detection and location-aware prevention mechanism for network coding-enabled mobile small cells

Mobile small cell technology is considered as a 5G enabling technology for delivering ubiquitous 5G services in a cost-effective and energy efficient manner. Moreover, Network Coding (NC) technology can be foreseen as a promising solution for the wireless network of mobile small cells to increase its throughput and improve its performance. However, NC-enabled mobile small cells are vulnerable to pollution attacks due to the inherent vulnerabilities of NC. Although there are several works on pollution attack detection, the attackers may continue to pollute packets in the next transmission of coded packets of the same generation from the source node to the destination nodes. Therefore, in this paper, we present an intrusion detection and location-aware prevention (IDLP) mechanism which does not only detect the polluted packets and drop them but also identify the attacker's exact location so as to block them and prevent packet pollution in the next transmissions. In the proposed IDLP mechanism, the detection and locating schemes are based on a null space-based homomorphic MAC scheme. However, the proposed IDLP mechanism is efficient because, in its initial phase (i.e., Phase 1), it is not needed to be applied to all mobile devices in order to protect the NC-enabled mobile small cells from the depletion of their resources. The proposed efficient IDLP mechanism has been implemented in Kodo, and its performance has been evaluated and compared with our previous IDPS scheme proposed in [1], in terms of computational complexity, communicational overhead, and successfully decoding probability as well

New directions for remote data integrity checking of cloud storage

Cloud storage services allow data owners to outsource their data, and thus reduce their workload and cost in data storage and management. However, most data owners today are still reluctant to outsource their data to the cloud storage providers (CSP), simply because they do not trust the CSPs, and have no confidence that the CSPs will secure their valuable data. This dissertation focuses on Remote Data Checking (RDC), a collection of protocols which can allow a client (data owner) to check the integrity of data outsourced at an untrusted server, and thus to audit whether the server fulfills its contractual obligations. Robustness has not been considered for the dynamic RDCs in the literature. The R-DPDP scheme being designed is the first RDC scheme that provides robustness and, at the same time, supports dynamic data updates, while requiring small, constant, client storage. The main challenge that has to be overcome is to reduce the client-server communication during updates under an adversarial setting. A security analysis for R-DPDP is provided. Single-server RDCs are useful to detect server misbehavior, but do not have provisions to recover damaged data. Thus in practice, they should be extended to a distributed setting, in which the data is stored redundantly at multiple servers. The client can use RDC to check each server and, upon having detected a corrupted server, it can repair this server by retrieving data from healthy servers, so that the reliability level can be maintained. Previously, RDC has been investigated for replication-based and erasure coding-based distributed storage systems. However, RDC has not been investigated for network coding-based distributed storage systems that rely on untrusted servers. RDC-NC is the first RDC scheme for network coding-based distributed storage systems to ensure data remain intact when faced with data corruption, replay, and pollution attacks. Experimental evaluation shows that RDC-NC is inexpensive for both the clients and the servers. The setting considered so far outsources the storage of the data, but the data owner is still heavily involved in the data management process (especially during the repair of damaged data). A new paradigm is proposed, in which the data owner fully outsources both the data storage and the management of the data. In traditional distributed RDC schemes, the repair phase imposes a significant burden on the client, who needs to expend a significant amount of computation and communication, thus, it is very difficult to keep the client lightweight. A new self-repairing concept is developed, in which the servers are responsible to repair the corruption, while the client acts as a lightweight coordinator during repair. To realize this new concept, two novel RDC schemes, RDC-SR and ERDC-SR, are designed for replication-based distributed storage systems, which enable Server-side Repair and minimize the load on the client side. Version control systems (VCS) provide the ability to track and control changes made to the data over time. The changes are usually stored in a VCS repository which, due to its massive size, is often hosted at an untrusted CSP. RDC can be used to address concerns about the untrusted nature of the VCS server by allowing a data owner to periodically check that the server continues to store the data. The RDC-AVCS scheme being designed relies on RDC to ensure all the data versions are retrievable from the untrusted server over time. The RDC-AVCS prototype built on top of Apache SVN only incurs a modest decrease in performance compared to a regular (non-secure) SVN system