Wireless Sensor Network Security: Approaches to Detecting and Avoiding Wormhole Attacks

This paper explores Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and the related security issues and complications arising from a specific type of security breach, the wormhole attack. Wormhole attacks against WSNs are classified as passive, external laptop-class threats. Because malicious wormhole attacks are increasing, these attacks pose a serious security threat and increase the costs to maintain a Wireless Sensor Network. Research into preventing wormhole attacks yields two distinct model approach types: Administrator-Viewpoint models and User-Viewpoint models. While the modalities vary, the four Administrator-Viewpoint models reviewed were designed in the early 2000s and suggest defending against wormhole attacks through the use of expensive hardware, packet leashes, or topology visualization systems. On the other hand, the four proposed User-Viewpoint models have become the current theoretical models of choice.  While existing as simulation approaches to defend against wormhole attacks, the User-Viewpoint models use internally calculated routing algorithms to suggest routes to avoid or evade, not defend against, established wormhole routes. This paper confirms the efficacies of the User-Viewpoint models in the lab simulations are viewed as the most promising cost-effective, future security solutions to wormhole attacks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs): Security and Privacy Issues and Solutions

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become one of the current research areas, and it proves to be a very supportive technology for various applications such as environmental-, military-, health-, home-, and office-based applications. WSN can either be mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) or static wireless sensor network (SWSN). MWSN is a specialized wireless network consisting of considerable number of mobile sensors, however the instability of its topology introduces several performance issues during data routing. SWSNs consisting of static nodes with static topology also share some of the security challenges of MWSNs due to some constraints associated with the sensor nodes. Security, privacy, computation and energy constraints, and reliability issues are the major challenges facing WSNs, especially during routing. To solve these challenges, WSN routing protocols must ensure confidentiality, integrity, privacy preservation, and reliability in the network. Thus, efficient and energy-aware countermeasures have to be designed to prevent intrusion in the network. In this chapter, we describe different forms of WSNs, challenges, solutions, and a point-to-point multi-hop-based secure solution for effective routing in WSNs

A Study of Geocast Routing Protocols in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET)

Geocast routing has been comprehensively investigated for consistent and well-organized spreading of information due to growing number of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications favouring geocasting. Freshly, different geocast routing protocol have been developed in vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET). In this paper, a qualitative survey of recent geocast routing protocols and some specific future research issues in geocast routing have been provided. A practical and qualitative explanation of each considered protocols have been presented. All the considered protocols have been relatively characterized. This relative study leads us towards some future research challenges in geocast routing. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.150519

Countering DoS Attacks With Stateless Multipath Overlays

Indirection-based overlay networks (IONs) are a promising approach for countering distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Such mechanisms are based on the assumption that attackers will attack a fixed and bounded set of overlay nodes causing service disruption to a small fraction of the users. In addition, attackers cannot eaves-drop on links inside the network or otherwise gain information that can help them focus their attacks on overlay nodes that are critical for specific communication flows. We develop an analytical model and a new class of attacks that considers both simple and advanced adversaries. We show that the impact of these simple attacks on IONs can severely disrupt communications. We propose a stateless spread-spectrum paradigm to create per-packet path diversity between each pair of end-nodes using a modified ION access protocol. Our system protects end-to-end communications from DoS attacks without sacrificing strong client authentication or allowing an attacker with partial connectivity information to repeatedly disrupt communications. Through analysis, we show that an Akamai-sized overlay can withstand attacks involving over 1.3M "zombie" hosts while providing uninterrupted end-to-end connectivity. By using packet replication, the system can resist attacks that render up to 40% of the nodes inoperable. Surprisingly, our experiments on PlanetLab demonstrate that in many cases end-to-end latency decreases when packet replication is used, with a worst-case increase by a factor of 2.5. Similarly, our system imposes less than 15% performance degradation in the end-to-end throughput, even when subjected to a large DDoS attack

A REVIEW ON SECURITY ENHANCEMENT THROUGH ANONYMOUS ROUTING IN MANET

Mobile Ad Hoc Network(MANET) is an infrastructure less network. Any node may enter or leave network at anytime. MANET also has less resources and limited security. MANET is vulnerable to attacks because of its lack of centralized infrastructure. Security in MANET can be achieved by Anonymous routing which hide source, destinationand route information to provide. This paper provides a review on efficient anonymous routing protocols used in MANET and also compares the security in terms of identity, location and route anonymity. An anonymous routing protocol that conceals the essential details and satisfies the basic protocol properties has to be proposed

A payload-based mutual authentication scheme for Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a vision that broadens the scope of the Internet by incorporating physical objects to identify themselves to the participating entities. This innovative concept enables a physical object to represent itself in the digital world. There have been a lot of speculations and future forecasts about these physical objects connected with the Internet, however, most of them lack secure features and are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. Miniature sensor nodes, embedded in these physical objects, limit the support for computationally complex and resource-consuming secured algorithms. In this paper, we propose a lightweight mutual authentication scheme for the real-world physical objects of an IoT environment. It is a payload-based encryption scheme which uses a simple four-way handshake mechanism to verify the identities of the participating objects. The real-world objects communicate with each other using the client–server interaction model. Our proposed scheme uses the lightweight features of Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) to enable the clients to observe resources residing on the server, in an energy-efficient manner. We use Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), with a key length of bits, to establish a secured session for resource observation. We evaluate our scheme for a real-world scenario using NetDuino Plus 2 boards. Our scheme is computationally efficient, incurs less connection overhead and at the same time, provides a robust defence against various attacks such as, resource exhaustion, Denial-of-Service, replay and physical tampering

A secure communication framework for wireless sensor networks

Today, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are no longer a nascent technology and future networks, especially Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) will integrate more sensor-based systems into a variety of application scenarios. Typical application areas include medical, environmental, military, and commercial enterprises. Providing security to this diverse set of sensor-based applications is necessary for the healthy operations of the overall system because untrusted entities may target the proper functioning of applications and disturb the critical decision-making processes by injecting false information into the network. One way to address this issue is to employ en-route-filtering-based solutions utilizing keys generated by either static or dynamic key management schemes in the WSN literature. However, current schemes are complicated for resource-constrained sensors as they utilize many keys and more importantly as they transmit many keying messages in the network, which increases the energy consumption of WSNs that are already severely limited in the technical capabilities and resources (i.e., power, computational capacities, and memory) available to them. Nonetheless, further improvements without too much overhead are still possible by sharing a dynamically created cryptic credential. Building upon this idea, the purpose of this thesis is to introduce an efficient and secure communication framework for WSNs. Specifically, three protocols are suggested as contributions using virtual energies and local times onboard the sensors as dynamic cryptic credentials: (1) Virtual Energy-Based Encryption and Keying (VEBEK); (2) TIme-Based DynamiC Keying and En-Route Filtering (TICK); (3) Secure Source-Based Loose Time Synchronization (SOBAS) for WSNs.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Copeland, John; Committee Co-Chair: Beyah, Raheem; Committee Member: Li, Geoffrey; Committee Member: Owen, Henry; Committee Member: Zegura, Ellen; Committee Member: Zhang, Fumi