Security and Privacy in Heterogeneous Wireless and Mobile Networks: Challenges and Solutions

abstract: The rapid advances in wireless communications and networking have given rise to a number of emerging heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks along with novel networking paradigms, including wireless sensor networks, mobile crowdsourcing, and mobile social networking. While offering promising solutions to a wide range of new applications, their widespread adoption and large-scale deployment are often hindered by people's concerns about the security, user privacy, or both. In this dissertation, we aim to address a number of challenging security and privacy issues in heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks in an attempt to foster their widespread adoption. Our contributions are mainly fivefold. First, we introduce a novel secure and loss-resilient code dissemination scheme for wireless sensor networks deployed in hostile and harsh environments. Second, we devise a novel scheme to enable mobile users to detect any inauthentic or unsound location-based top-k query result returned by an untrusted location-based service providers. Third, we develop a novel verifiable privacy-preserving aggregation scheme for people-centric mobile sensing systems. Fourth, we present a suite of privacy-preserving profile matching protocols for proximity-based mobile social networking, which can support a wide range of matching metrics with different privacy levels. Last, we present a secure combination scheme for crowdsourcing-based cooperative spectrum sensing systems that can enable robust primary user detection even when malicious cognitive radio users constitute the majority.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Electrical Engineering 201

Privacy preserving data collection framework for user centric network applications

Advances in mobile and ubiquitous computing increased the number of user centric applications that comes into all aspects of our lives. This situation has started to threaten our privacy and created a huge demand for development of privacy-aware applications. Comprehensive privacy protection mechanisms have to take all phases of data processing into considerations including data collection from users, storage of data in central servers, and sharing them with third parties. However, privacy studies in the literature generally bring solutions for sharing of collected information with third parties. In this thesis, a privacy preserving data collection framework is proposed for user centric network applications. Framework provides privacy of data en route to data collector(s). We propose a generic bottom-up clustering method that utilizes k-anonymity or l-diversity concepts during anonymization. Entropy based metrics for information loss and anonymity level are defined and used in performance evaluations. Framework is adapted for networks having different data collector parties with different privacy levels. Our framework is applied for two types of data collection applications: (i) privacy preserving data collection in wireless sensor networks, (ii) preservation of organiza- tional privacy during collection of intrusion detection logs from different organiza- tions. Traditional data utility vs. privacy trade-off has one more dimension in wireless sensor networks. This dimension is minimization of bandwidth or energy consump- tion due to the limitations of tiny sensor nodes. Our analyses show that the proposed framework presents a suitable trade-off mechanism among energy consumption minimization, data utility and privacy preservation in wireless sensor network applications with one or multiple sinks. It is also demonstrated that our framework brings effective solution for preserving organizational privacy during sharing of intrusion detection logs among organizations and central security monitoring entity

A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table