A Secure and User Privacy-Preserving Searching Protocol for Peer-to-Peer Networks

File sharing peer-to-peer networks have become quite popular of late as a new paradigm for information exchange among large number of users in the Internet. However, these networks suffer from several problems such as fake content distribution, free riding, whitewashing, poor search scalability, lack of a robust trust model and absence of user privacy protection mechanism. In this paper, a secure and efficient searching scheme for peer-to-peer networks has been proposed that utilizes topology adaptation by constructing an overlay of trusted peers where the neighbors are selected based on their trust ratings and content similarities. While increasing the search efficiency by intelligently exploiting the formation of semantic community structures among the trustworthy peers, the scheme provides a highly reliable module for protecting the privacy of the users and data in the network. Simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme provides efficient searching to good peers while penalizing the malicious peers by increasing their search times

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