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

Lightweight mutual authentication and privacy preservation schemes for IOT systems.

Internet of Things (IoT) presents a holistic and transformative approach for providing services in different domains. IoT creates an atmosphere of interaction between humans and the surrounding physical world through various technologies such as sensors, actuators, and the cloud. Theoretically, when everything is connected, everything is at risk. The rapid growth of IoT with the heterogeneous devices that are connected to the Internet generates new challenges in protecting and preserving user’s privacy and ensuring the security of our lives. IoT systems face considerable challenges in deploying robust authentication protocols because some of the IoT devices are resource-constrained with limited computation and storage capabilities to implement the currently available authentication mechanism that employs computationally expensive functions. The limited capabilities of IoT devices raise significant security and privacy concerns, such as ensuring personal information confidentiality and integrity and establishing end-to-end authentication and secret key generation between the communicating device to guarantee secure communication among the communicating devices. The ubiquity nature of the IoT device provides adversaries more attack surfaces which can lead to tragic consequences that can negatively impact our everyday connected lives. According to [1], authentication and privacy protection are essential security requirements. Therefore, there is a critical need to address these rising security and privacy concerns to ensure IoT systems\u27 safety. This dissertation identifies gaps in the literature and presents new mutual authentication and privacy preservation schemes that fit the needs of resource-constrained devices to improve IoT security and privacy against common attacks. This research enhances IoT security and privacy by introducing lightweight mutual authentication and privacy preservation schemes for IoT based on hardware biometrics using PUF, Chained hash PUF, dynamic identities, and user’s static and continuous biometrics. The communicating parties can anonymously communicate and mutually authenticate each other and locally establish a session key using dynamic identities to ensure the user’s unlinkability and untraceability. Furthermore, virtual domain segregation is implemented to apply security policies between nodes. The chained-hash PUF mechanism technique is implemented as a way to verify the sender’s identity. At first, this dissertation presents a framework called “A Lightweight Mutual Authentication and Privacy-Preservation framework for IoT Systems” and this framework is considered the foundation of all presented schemes. The proposed framework integrates software and hardware-based security approaches that satisfy the NIST IoT security requirements for data protection and device identification. Also, this dissertation presents an architecture called “PUF Hierarchal Distributed Architecture” (PHDA), which is used to perform the device name resolution. Based on the proposed framework and PUF architecture, three lightweight privacy-preserving and mutual authentication schemes are presented. The Three different schemes are introduced to accommodate both stationary and mobile IoT devices as well as local and distributed nodes. The first scheme is designed for the smart homes domain, where the IoT devices are stationary, and the controller node is local. In this scheme, there is direct communication between the IoT nodes and the controller node. Establishing mutual authentication does not require the cloud service\u27s involvement to reduce the system latency and offload the cloud traffic. The second scheme is designed for the industrial IoT domain and used smart poultry farms as a use case of the Industrial IoT (IIoT) domain. In the second scheme, the IoT devices are stationary, and the controller nodes are hierarchical and distributed, supported by machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. The third scheme is designed for smart cities and used IoV fleet vehicles as a use case of the smart cities domain. During the roaming service, the mutual authentication process between a vehicle and the distributed controller nodes represented by the Roadside Units (RSUs) is completed through the cloud service that stores all vehicle\u27s security credentials. After that, when a vehicle moves to the proximity of a new RSU under the same administrative authority of the most recently visited RSU, the two RSUs can cooperate to verify the vehicle\u27s legitimacy. Also, the third scheme supports driver static and continuous authentication as a driver monitoring system for the sake of both road and driver safety. The security of the proposed schemes is evaluated and simulated using two different methods: security analysis and performance analysis. The security analysis is implemented through formal security analysis and informal security analysis. The formal analysis uses the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic (BAN) and model-checking using the automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) toolkit. The informal security analysis is completed by: (1) investigating the robustness of the proposed schemes against the well-known security attacks and analyze its satisfaction with the main security properties; and (2) comparing the proposed schemes with the other existing authentication schemes considering their resistance to the well-known attacks and their satisfaction with the main security requirements. Both the formal and informal security analyses complement each other. The performance evaluation is conducted by analyzing and comparing the overhead and efficiency of the proposed schemes with other related schemes from the literature. The results showed that the proposed schemes achieve all security goals and, simultaneously, efficiently and satisfy the needs of the resource-constrained IoT devices

AUTHENTICATED KEY ESTABLISHMENT PROTOCOL FOR CONSTRAINED SMART HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS BASED ON PHYSICAL UNCLONABLE FUNCTION

Smart healthcare systems are one of the critical applications of the internet of things. They benefit many categories of the population and provide significant improvement to healthcare services. Smart healthcare systems are also susceptible to many threats and exploits because they run without supervision for long periods of time and communicate via open channels. Moreover, in many implementations, healthcare sensor nodes are implanted or miniaturized and are resource-constrained. The potential risks on patients/individuals’ life from the threats necessitate that securing the connections in these systems is of utmost importance. This thesis provides a solution to secure end-to-end communications in such systems by proposing an authenticated key establishment protocol. The main objective of the protocol is to examine how physical unclonable functions could be utilized as a lightweight root of trust. The protocol’s design is based on rigid security requirements and inspired by the vulnerability of physical unclonable function to machine learning modeling attacks as well as the use of a ratchet technique. The proposed protocol verification and analysis revealed that it is a suitable candidate for resource-constrained smart healthcare systems. The proposed protocol’s design also has an impact on other important aspects such as anonymity of sensor nodes and gateway-lose scenario

A Review of Research on Privacy Protection of Internet of Vehicles Based on Blockchain

Numerous academic and industrial fields, such as healthcare, banking, and supply chain management, are rapidly adopting and relying on blockchain technology. It has also been suggested for application in the internet of vehicles (IoV) ecosystem as a way to improve service availability and reliability. Blockchain offers decentralized, distributed and tamper-proof solutions that bring innovation to data sharing and management, but do not themselves protect privacy and data confidentiality. Therefore, solutions using blockchain technology must take user privacy concerns into account. This article reviews the proposed solutions that use blockchain technology to provide different vehicle services while overcoming the privacy leakage problem which inherently exists in blockchain and vehicle services. We analyze the key features and attributes of prior schemes and identify their contributions to provide a comprehensive and critical overview. In addition, we highlight prospective future research topics and present research problems

A comprehensive survey of V2X cybersecurity mechanisms and future research paths

Recent advancements in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication have notably improved existing transport systems by enabling increased connectivity and driving autonomy levels. The remarkable benefits of V2X connectivity come inadvertently with challenges which involve security vulnerabilities and breaches. Addressing security concerns is essential for seamless and safe operation of mission-critical V2X use cases. This paper surveys current literature on V2X security and provides a systematic and comprehensive review of the most relevant security enhancements to date. An in-depth classification of V2X attacks is first performed according to key security and privacy requirements. Our methodology resumes with a taxonomy of security mechanisms based on their proactive/reactive defensive approach, which helps identify strengths and limitations of state-of-the-art countermeasures for V2X attacks. In addition, this paper delves into the potential of emerging security approaches leveraging artificial intelligence tools to meet security objectives. Promising data-driven solutions tailored to tackle security, privacy and trust issues are thoroughly discussed along with new threat vectors introduced inevitably by these enablers. The lessons learned from the detailed review of existing works are also compiled and highlighted. We conclude this survey with a structured synthesis of open challenges and future research directions to foster contributions in this prominent field.This work is supported by the H2020-INSPIRE-5Gplus project (under Grant agreement No. 871808), the ”Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformacion Digital” and the European Union-NextGenerationEU in the frameworks of the ”Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia” and of the ”Mecanismo de Recuperación y Resiliencia” under references TSI-063000-2021-39/40/41, and the CHIST-ERA-17-BDSI-003 FIREMAN project funded by the Spanish National Foundation (Grant PCI2019-103780).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Cryptographic Key Management in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs): A survey

Since their appearance at the dawn of the second millennium, Delay or Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have gradually evolved, spurring the development of a variety of methods and protocols for making them more secure and resilient. In this context, perhaps, the most challenging problem to deal with is that of cryptographic key management. To the best of our knowledge, the work at hand is the first to survey the relevant literature and classify the various so far proposed key management approaches in such a restricted and harsh environment. Towards this goal, we have grouped the surveyed key management methods into three major categories depending on whether the particular method copes with a) security initialization, b) key establishment, and c) key revocation. We have attempted to provide a concise but fairly complete evaluation of the proposed up-to-date methods in a generalized way with the aim of offering a central reference point for future research