An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

Automatism is never a defence

The central aim of this article is to set out and justify the contention that automatism is never a defence, not even exceptionally. Where D is not at fault for her lack of voluntariness, the term ‘automatism’ is simply a shorthand explanation that D does not satisfy an essential element of every offence: voluntary conduct. Where D is at fault for her lack of voluntariness, the automatism rules (within the current law) become an inculpatory tool through which to substitute the missing offence elements and construct liability. Having recognised that automatism plays an inculpatory role within the law, we analyse this role and conclude that it is defective: prior fault automatism lacks the equivalent blameworthiness necessary to fairly substitute for even missing basic intent offence elements. It is from here that we discuss the possibility of a new automatism offence, to recognise the criminal blameworthiness of D’s conduct in certain cases, but to do so in a coherent manner that appropriately criminalises and labels the defendant. Looking at the outline of the potential new offence we are in a much better position to evaluate the future role of automatism in the criminal law. If we do not believe that such an offence is deserving of criminalisation, then the current law must be changed to prevent prior fault automatism constructing liability under any circumstances. If we do believe that such an offence has a place within the criminal law, then the current law should be changed to reflect this more clearly, and we must focus on exactly how it should be defined

The Australian Cyber Security Centre threat report 2015

Introduction: The number, type and sophistication of cyber security threats to Australia and Australians are increasing. Due to the varied nature of motivations for cyber adversaries targeting Australian organisations, organisations could be a target for malicious activities even if they do not think the information held on their networks is valuable, or that their business would be of interest to cyber adversaries. This first unclassified report by the ACSC describes the range of cyber adversaries targeting Australian networks, explains their motivations, the malicious activities they are conducting and their impact, and provides specific examples of activity targeting Australian networks during 2014. This report also offers mitigation advice on how organisations can defend against these activities. The ACSC’s ability to detect and defend against sophisticated cyber threats continues to improve. But cyber adversaries are constantly improving their tradecraft in their attempts to defeat our network defences and exploit the new technologies we embrace. There are gaps in our understanding of the extent and nature of malicious activity, particularly against the business sector. The ACSC is reaching out to industry to build partnerships to improve our collective understanding. Future iterations of the Threat Report will benefit from these partnerships and help to close gaps in our knowledge

Social engineering and crime prevention in cyberspace

This paper highlights methods of syntactic and semantic social engineering attacks (human-based and computer-based) that are currently prevalent in the cyber community. It will also present the emerging trends in high-tech crime; and, the likely future direction cyber-crime will take with respect to social engineering

Strengthening the security of cognitive packet networks

Route selection in cognitive packet networks (CPNs) occurs continuously for active flows and is driven by the users' choice of a quality of service (QoS) goal. Because routing occurs concurrently to packet forwarding, CPN flows are able to better deal with unexpected variations in network status, while still achieving the desired QoS. Random neural networks (RNNs) play a key role in CPN routing and are responsible to the next-hop decision making of CPN packets. By using reinforcement learning, RNNs' weights are continuously updated based on expected QoS goals and information that is collected by packets as they travel on the network experiencing the current network conditions. CPN's QoS performance had been extensively investigated for a variety of operating conditions. Its dynamic and self-adaptive properties make them suitable for withstanding availability attacks, such as those caused by worm propagation and denial-of-service attacks. However, security weaknesses related to confidentiality and integrity attacks have not been previously examined. Here, we look at related network security threats and propose mechanisms that could enhance the resilience of CPN to confidentiality, integrity and availability attacks

Autonomic computing meets SCADA security

© 2017 IEEE. National assets such as transportation networks, large manufacturing, business and health facilities, power generation, and distribution networks are critical infrastructures. The cyber threats to these infrastructures have increasingly become more sophisticated, extensive and numerous. Cyber security conventional measures have proved useful in the past but increasing sophistication of attacks dictates the need for newer measures. The autonomic computing paradigm mimics the autonomic nervous system and is promising to meet the latest challenges in the cyber threat landscape. This paper provides a brief review of autonomic computing applications for SCADA systems and proposes architecture for cyber security

EU SUGGESTED BEST PRACTICE DOCUMENT: CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EU-WIDE HATE CRIME LAWS

This document subjects the various EU hate crime provisions to critical policy analysis, weighing up their pros and cons, and defending aspects of them from inappropriate forms of critique, and then draws some policy conclusions based on a sense of best practice. The aim of identifying best practice is to generate reform suggestions in the form of detailed model legislation. This is contained in the final section of this document. A key point considered is the narrow definition of protected groups under current EU measures. The restrictions to racist forms of hate crime and genocide denial contained in the Framework Decision is not central to the political and constitutional cultures of all member states. Indeed, it has not prevented the criminal law implementation measures of some EU Member States from including a number of other grounds, such as disability, anti-Semitism, or sexual orientation. Certain EU bodies have even encouraged this expansive approach to national implementation, with the FRA stating: ‘In the spirit of non-discrimination, it is certainly preferable to widen criminal law provisions to include equally all grounds of discrimination covered by Article 14 of the ECHR or Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.’ This criticism would, in practice, suggest a need for Members State supplementing these categories with one of more the following: gender, social origin, genetic features, language, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, birth, property or other status, disability, age or sexual orientation. Whilst supporting an expansion of the range of groups covered, the following paragraphs issue a cautionary warning against a massive extension to cover all these groups on grounds of both principle and practical consequences

Preventing Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks on the IMS Emergency Services Support through Adaptive Firewall Pinholing

Emergency services are vital services that Next Generation Networks (NGNs) have to provide. As the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is in the heart of NGNs, 3GPP has carried the burden of specifying a standardized IMS-based emergency services framework. Unfortunately, like any other IP-based standards, the IMS-based emergency service framework is prone to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. We propose in this work, a simple but efficient solution that can prevent certain types of such attacks by creating firewall pinholes that regular clients will surely be able to pass in contrast to the attackers clients. Our solution was implemented, tested in an appropriate testbed, and its efficiency was proven.Comment: 17 Pages, IJNGN Journa