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

Performance Analysis of Traffic and Mobility Models on Mobile and Vehicular Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Advances in wireless communication technology and the proliferation of mobile devices enable the capa- bilities of communicating with each other even in areas with no pre-existing communication infrastructure. Traffic and mobility models play an important role in evaluating the performance of these communication networks. Despite criticism and assumption from various researches on Transmission Control Protocols (TCP), weaknesses on Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), and Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET). A simulation was carried out to evaluate the performance of Constant Bit Rate, Variable Bit Rate and Transmission Control Protocol on MANET and VANET using DSR routing protocol. CBR, VBR, and TCP have different manufacturer operation mechanisms and these differences lead to significant performance of CBR and VBR over TCP with better throughput and less average maximal end-to-end delay. DSR was able to respond to link failure at low mobility which led to TCP’s performance in packets delivery

Modeling Probability of Path Loss for DSDV, OLSR and DYMO above 802.11 and 802.11p

This paper presents path loss model along with framework for probability distribution function for VANETs. Furthermore, we simulate three routing protocols Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV), Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO) in NS-2 to evaluate and compare their performance using two Mac-layer Protocols 802.11 and 802.11p. A novel approach of this work is modifications in existing parameters to achieve high efficiency. After extensive simulations, we observe that DSDV out performs with 802.11p while DYMO gives best performance with 802.11.Comment: IEEE 8th International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications (BWCCA'13), Compiegne, Franc

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

DPRAODV: A Dynamic Learning System Against Blackhole Attack In AODV Based MANET

Security is an essential requirement in mobile ad hoc networks to provide protected communication between mobile nodes. Due to unique characteristics of MANETS, it creates a number of consequential challenges to its security design. To overcome the challenges, there is a need to build a multifence security solution that achieves both broad protection and desirable network performance. MANETs are vulnerable to various attacks, blackhole, is one of the possible attacks. Black hole is a type of routing attack where a malicious node advertise itself as having the shortest path to all nodes in the environment by sending fake route reply. By doing this, the malicious node can deprive the traffic from the source node. It can be used as a denial-of-service attack where it can drop the packets later. In this paper, we proposed a DPRAODV (Detection, Prevention and Reactive AODV) to prevent security threats of blackhole by notifying other nodes in the network of the incident. The simulation results in ns2 (ver-2.33) demonstrate that our protocol not only prevents blackhole attack but consequently improves the overall performance of (normal) AODV in presence of black hole attack