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

A two‐step authentication framework for Mobile ad hoc networks

The lack of fixed infrastructure in ad hoc networks causes nodes to rely more heavily on peer nodes for communication. Nevertheless, establishing trust in such a distributed environment is very difficult, since it is not straightforward for a node to determine if its peer nodes can be trusted. An additional concern in such an environment is with whether a peer node is merely relaying a message or if it is the originator of the message. In this paper, we propose an authentication approach for protecting nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. The security requirements for protecting data link and network layers are identified and the design criteria for creating secure ad hoc networks using several authentication protocols are analyzed. Protocols based on zero knowledge and challenge response techniques are presented and their performance is evaluated through analysis and simulation

Routing Security in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

The role of infrastructure-less mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in ubiquitous networks is outlined. In a MANET there are no dedicated routers and all network nodes must contribute to routing. Classification of routing protocols for MANET is based on how routing information is acquired and maintained by mobile nodes and/or on roles of network nodes in a routing. According to the first classification base, MANET routing protocols are proactive, reactive, or hybrid combinations of proactive and reactive protocols. According to the role-based classification, MANET routing protocols are either uniform when all network nodes have the same role or non-uniform when the roles are different and dedicated. A contemporary review of MANET routing protocols is briefly presented. Security attacks against MANET routing can be passive and or active. The purpose of the former is information retrieval, for example network traffic monitoring, while the latter is performed by malicious nodes with the express intention of disturbing, modifying or interrupting MANET routing. An overview of active attacks based on modification, impersonation/ spoofing, fabrication, wormhole, and selfish behavior is presented. The importance of cryptography and trust in secure MANET routing is also outlined, with relevant security extensions of existing routing protocols for MANETs described and assessed. A comparison of existing secure routing protocols form the main contribution in this paper, while some future research challenges in secure MANET routing are discussed

Effectiveness of segment routing technology in reducing the bandwidth and cloud resources provisioning times in network function virtualization architectures

Network Function Virtualization is a new technology allowing for a elastic cloud and bandwidth resource allocation. The technology requires an orchestrator whose role is the service and resource orchestration. It receives service requests, each one characterized by a Service Function Chain, which is a set of service functions to be executed according to a given order. It implements an algorithm for deciding where both to allocate the cloud and bandwidth resources and to route the SFCs. In a traditional orchestration algorithm, the orchestrator has a detailed knowledge of the cloud and network infrastructures and that can lead to high computational complexity of the SFC Routing and Cloud and Bandwidth resource Allocation (SRCBA) algorithm. In this paper, we propose and evaluate the effectiveness of a scalable orchestration architecture inherited by the one proposed within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and based on the functional separation of an NFV orchestrator in Resource Orchestrator (RO) and Network Service Orchestrator (NSO). Each cloud domain is equipped with an RO whose task is to provide a simple and abstract representation of the cloud infrastructure. These representations are notified of the NSO that can apply a simplified and less complex SRCBA algorithm. In addition, we show how the segment routing technology can help to simplify the SFC routing by means of an effective addressing of the service functions. The scalable orchestration solution has been investigated and compared to the one of a traditional orchestrator in some network scenarios and varying the number of cloud domains. We have verified that the execution time of the SRCBA algorithm can be drastically reduced without degrading the performance in terms of cloud and bandwidth resource costs

Study of Performance of Security Protocols in Wireless Mesh Network

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) represent a good solution to providing wireless Internet connectivity in a sizable geographic area; this new and promising paradigm allows for network deployment at a much lower cost than with classic WiFi networks. Standards-based wireless access takes advantage of the growing popularity of inexpensive Wi-Fi clients,enabling new service opportunities and applications that improve user productivity and responsiveness. The deployment of WMNs, are suffered by : (i) All, the communications being wireless and therefore prone to interference, present severe capacity and delay constraints, (ii) The second reason that slows down the deployment of WMNs is the lack of security guarantees. Wireless mesh networks mostly susceptible to routing protocol threats and route disruption attacks. Most of these threats require packet injection with a specialized knowledge of the routing protocol; the threats to wireless mesh networks and are summarized as (i) External attacks: in which attackers not belonging to the network jam the communication or inject erroneous information, and (ii) Internal attacks: in which attackers are internal, compromised nodes that are difficult to be detected. The MAC layers of WMN are subjected to the attacks like Eavesdropping, Link Layer Jamming Attack, MAC Spoofing Attack, and Replay Attack. The attacks in Network Layer are: Control Plane Attacks, Data Plane Attacks, Rushing attack, Wormhole attack, and Black Hole Attack. In this project work we are concern with the threats related to Network layer of WMN based upon 802.11i and analysis the performance of secure routing protocols and their performance against the intrusion detection

Traffic engineering multi-layer optimization for wireless mesh network transmission a campus network routing protocol transmission performance inhancement

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThe wireless mesh network is a potential network for the future due to its excellent inherent characteristic for dynamic self-healing, self-configuration and self-organization. It also has the advantage of easy interoperability networking and the ability to form multi-linked ad-hoc networks. It has a decentralized topology, is cheap and highly scalable. Furthermore, its ease in deployment and easy maintenance are other inherent networking qualities. These aforementioned qualities of the wireless mesh network bring advantages to transmission capability of heterogeneous networks. However, transmissions in wireless mesh network create comparative performance based challenges such as congestion, load-balancing, scalability over increasing networks and coverage capacity. Consequently, these challenges and problems in the routing and switching of packets in the wireless mesh network routing protocols led to a proposal on the resolution of these failures with a combination algorithm and a management based security for the network and its transmitted packets. There are equally contentious services like reliability of the network and quality of service for real-time multimedia traffic flows with other challenges such as path computation and selection in the wireless mesh network. This thesis is therefore a cumulative proposal to the resolution of the outlined challenges and open research areas posed by using wireless mesh network routing protocol. It advances the resolution of these challenges in the mesh environment using a hybrid optimization – traffic engineering, to increase the effectiveness and the reliability of the network. It also proffers a cumulative resolution of the diverse contributions on wireless mesh network routing protocol and transmission. Adaptation and optimization are carried out on the wireless mesh network designed network using traffic engineering mechanism and technique. The research examines the patterns of mesh packet transmission and evaluates the challenges and failures in the mesh network packet transmission. It develops a solution based algorithm for resolutions and proposes the traffic engineering based solution.. These resultant performances and analysis are usually tested and compared over wireless mesh IEEE802.11n or other older proposed documented solution. This thesis used a carefully designed campus mesh network to show a comparative evaluation of an optimal performance of the mesh nodes and routers over a normal IEE802.11n based wireless domain network to show differentiation by optimization using the created algorithms. Furthermore, the indexes of performance being the metric are used to measure the utility and the reliability, including capacity and throughput at the destination during traffic engineered transmission. In addition, the security of these transmitted data and packets are optimized under a traffic engineered technique. Finally, this thesis offers an understanding to the security contribution using traffic engineering resolution to create a management algorithm for processing and computation of the wireless mesh networks security needs. The results of this thesis confirmed, completed and extended the existing predictions with real measurement

A Survey of Security Challenges and Issues in Manet

Nodes intriguing element in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are predictable to hold to the rules stated by the routing protocol utilized in the network. Safe routing protocols endeavor to decrease the ill-effect of nodes under the control of malicious entities who intentionally violate the protocol.. There are so many generic tools which are universal for individual as well as organizations for customers to offer protection which comprises Antivirus, Ant spam, etc., and network securities have turn into important issue in MANET. Security is one of the major issues in the MANET particularly w.r.t. complexity and size of the network. The main focus of this survey is to discuss & represent special characteristics of security in MANET and also apply several of the solutions security threats within MANET network similar to intruder activities, tapping and integrity, MANET link layer and network layer operations w.r.t. information security etc) w.r.t. MANET network. This Survey paper also discusses different number of security scenarios of MANET, Attacks in MANET and IDS in MANET. Keywords: AODV, MANET, Network Security, IDS, Attack