Collusion in Peer-to-Peer Systems

Peer-to-peer systems have reached a widespread use, ranging from academic and industrial applications to home entertainment. The key advantage of this paradigm lies in its scalability and flexibility, consequences of the participants sharing their resources for the common welfare. Security in such systems is a desirable goal. For example, when mission-critical operations or bank transactions are involved, their effectiveness strongly depends on the perception that users have about the system dependability and trustworthiness. A major threat to the security of these systems is the phenomenon of collusion. Peers can be selfish colluders, when they try to fool the system to gain unfair advantages over other peers, or malicious, when their purpose is to subvert the system or disturb other users. The problem, however, has received so far only a marginal attention by the research community. While several solutions exist to counter attacks in peer-to-peer systems, very few of them are meant to directly counter colluders and their attacks. Reputation, micro-payments, and concepts of game theory are currently used as the main means to obtain fairness in the usage of the resources. Our goal is to provide an overview of the topic by examining the key issues involved. We measure the relevance of the problem in the current literature and the effectiveness of existing philosophies against it, to suggest fruitful directions in the further development of the field

Secure Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to the service providers. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, with each access point (AP) connected to the wired network, in WMNs only a subset of the APs are required to be connected to the wired network. The APs that are connected to the wired network are called the Internet gateways (IGWs), while the APs that do not have wired connections are called the mesh routers (MRs). The MRs are connected to the IGWs using multi-hop communication. The IGWs provide access to conventional clients and interconnect ad hoc, sensor, cellular, and other networks to the Internet. However, most of the existing routing protocols for WMNs are extensions of protocols originally designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and thus they perform sub-optimally. Moreover, most routing protocols for WMNs are designed without security issues in mind, where the nodes are all assumed to be honest. In practical deployment scenarios, this assumption does not hold. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in WMNs and then particularly focuses on secure routing in these networks. First, it identifies security vulnerabilities in the medium access control (MAC) and the network layers. Various possibilities of compromising data confidentiality, data integrity, replay attacks and offline cryptanalysis are also discussed. Then various types of attacks in the MAC and the network layers are discussed. After enumerating the various types of attacks on the MAC and the network layer, the chapter briefly discusses on some of the preventive mechanisms for these attacks.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures, 5 table

A Comprehensive Survey on the Cooperation of Fog Computing Paradigm-Based IoT Applications: Layered Architecture, Real-Time Security Issues, and Solutions

The Internet of Things (IoT) can enable seamless communication between millions of billions of objects. As IoT applications continue to grow, they face several challenges, including high latency, limited processing and storage capacity, and network failures. To address these stated challenges, the fog computing paradigm has been introduced, purpose is to integrate the cloud computing paradigm with IoT to bring the cloud resources closer to the IoT devices. Thus, it extends the computing, storage, and networking facilities toward the edge of the network. However, data processing and storage occur at the IoT devices themselves in the fog-based IoT network, eliminating the need to transmit the data to the cloud. Further, it also provides a faster response as compared to the cloud. Unfortunately, the characteristics of fog-based IoT networks arise traditional real-time security challenges, which may increase severe concern to the end-users. However, this paper aims to focus on fog-based IoT communication, targeting real-time security challenges. In this paper, we examine the layered architecture of fog-based IoT networks along working of IoT applications operating within the context of the fog computing paradigm. Moreover, we highlight real-time security challenges and explore several existing solutions proposed to tackle these challenges. In the end, we investigate the research challenges that need to be addressed and explore potential future research directions that should be followed by the research community.©2023 The Authors. Published by IEEE. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

ROVER: a DNS-based method to detect and prevent IP hijacks

2013 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is critical to the global internet infrastructure. Unfortunately BGP routing was designed with limited regard for security. As a result, IP route hijacking has been observed for more than 16 years. Well known incidents include a 2008 hijack of YouTube, loss of connectivity for Australia in February 2012, and an event that partially crippled Google in November 2012. Concern has been escalating as critical national infrastructure is reliant on a secure foundation for the Internet. Disruptions to military, banking, utilities, industry, and commerce can be catastrophic. In this dissertation we propose ROVER (Route Origin VERification System), a novel and practical solution for detecting and preventing origin and sub-prefix hijacks. ROVER exploits the reverse DNS for storing route origin data and provides a fail-safe, best effort approach to authentication. This approach can be used with a variety of operational models including fully dynamic in-line BGP filtering, periodically updated authenticated route filters, and real-time notifications for network operators. Our thesis is that ROVER systems can be deployed by a small number of institutions in an incremental fashion and still effectively thwart origin and sub-prefix IP hijacking despite non-participation by the majority of Autonomous System owners. We then present research results supporting this statement. We evaluate the effectiveness of ROVER using simulations on an Internet scale topology as well as with tests on real operational systems. Analyses include a study of IP hijack propagation patterns, effectiveness of various deployment models, critical mass requirements, and an examination of ROVER resilience and scalability

A Genetic Programming-based trust model for P2P Networks

Abstract— Peer-to-Peer ( P2P ) systems have been the center of attention in recent years due to their advantage . Since each node in such networks can act both as a service provider and as a client , they are subject to different attacks . Therefore it is vital to manage confidence for these vulnerable environments in order to eliminate unsafe peers . This paper investigates the use of genetic programing for achieving trust of a peer without central monitoring . A model of confidence management is proposed here in which every peer ranks other peers according to calculated local confidence based on recommendations and previous interactions . The results show that this model identifies malicious nodes without the use of a central supervisor or overall confidence value and thus the system functions.Index Terms — peer - to - peer systems , confidence , genetic programing , malicious nodes

Network Coding based Information Security in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Multi-hop Wireless Networks (MWNs) represent a class of networks where messages are forwarded through multiple hops of wireless transmission. Applications of this newly emerging communication paradigm include asset monitoring wireless sensor networks (WSNs), command communication mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), community- or campus-wide wireless mesh networks (WMNs), etc. Information security is one of the major barriers to the wide-scale deployment of MWNs but has received little attention so far. On the one hand, due to the open wireless channels and multi-hop wireless transmissions, MWNs are vulnerable to various information security threats such as eavesdropping, data injection/modification, node compromising, traffic analysis, and flow tracing. On the other hand, the characteristics of MWNs including the vulnerability of intermediate network nodes, multi-path packet forwarding, and limited computing capability and storage capacity make the existing information security schemes designed for the conventional wired networks or single-hop wireless networks unsuitable for MWNs. Therefore, newly designed schemes are highly desired to meet the stringent security and performance requirements for the information security of MWNs. In this research, we focus on three fundamental information security issues in MWNs: efficient privacy preservation for source anonymity, which is critical to the information security of MWNs; the traffic explosion issue, which targets at preventing denial of service (DoS) and enhancing system availability; and the cooperative peer-to-peer information exchange issue, which is critical to quickly achieve maximum data availability if the base station is temporarily unavailable or the service of the base station is intermittent. We have made the following three major contributions. Firstly, we identify the severe threats of traffic analysis/flow tracing attacks to the information security in network coding enabled MWNs. To prevent these attacks and achieve source anonymity in MWNs, we propose a network coding based privacy-preserving scheme. The unique “mixing” feature of network coding is exploited in the proposed scheme to confuse adversaries from conducting advanced privacy attacks, such as time correlation, size correlation, and message content correlation. With homomorphic encryption functions, the proposed scheme can achieve both privacy preservation and data confidentiality, which are two critical information security requirements. Secondly, to prevent traffic explosion and at the same time achieve source unobservability in MWNs, we propose a network coding based privacy-preserving scheme, called SUNC (Source Unobservability using Network Coding). Network coding is utilized in the scheme to automatically absorb dummy messages at intermediate network nodes, and thus, traffic explosion induced denial of service (DoS) can be naturally prevented to ensure the system availability. In addition to ensuring system availability and achieving source unobservability, SUNC can also thwart internal adversaries. Thirdly, to enhance the data availability when a base station is temporarily unavailable or the service of the base station is intermittent, we propose a cooperative peer-to-peer information exchange scheme based on network coding. The proposed scheme can quickly accomplish optimal information exchange in terms of throughput and transmission delay. For each research issue, detailed simulation results in terms of computational overhead, transmission efficiency, and communication overhead, are given to demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed solutions