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

LEVEL PARTITIONING OF NODES TO ENHANCE THE NETWORK LIFETIME DURING INTRUSION DETECTION IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of many sensor nodes with low cost and power capability Based on the deployment, in the sensing coverage of a sensor node, typically more nodes are covered. A major challenge in constructing a WSN is to enhance the network life time. Nodes in a WSN are usually highly energy-constrained and expected to operate for long periods from limited on-board energy reserves. To permit this, nodes and the embedded software that they execute – must have energy-aware operation. Because of this, continued developments in energy-efficient operation are paramount, requiring major advances to be made in energy hardware, power management circuitry and energy aware algorithms znd protocols. During Intrusion Detection in sensor networks, some genuine nodes need to communicate with the Cluster Head to inform about the details of malicious nodes. For such applications in sensor networks, a large number of sensor nodes that are deployed densely in specific sensing environment share the same sensing tasks. Due to this, the individual nodes might waste their energy in sensing data that are not destined to it and as a result the drain in the energy of the node is more resulting in much reduced network life time. In this paper, a novel algorithm is developed to avoid redundancy in sensing the data thereby enhancing the life time of the network. The concept of Power Factor bit is proposed while a node communicates with the Cluster Head. The simulation results show that the network life time is greatly enhanced by the proposed method

Layered-MAC: An Energy-Protected and Efficient Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the radio of the wireless sensor node happens to be the highest source of energy consumption. Hence, there is a need to focus on the MAC layer, as it controls access to the radio. While there are several existing techniques to make sensors more energy-efficient, not many of them consider the security aspects of energy efficiency. By this we mean, protecting energy from external attacks. The existing protocols focus mainly on either duty-cycling (Sensor-MAC, Time-out MAC) or clustering (Gateway MAC), as a way of conserving energy. One of such attacks to energy is the denial-of-sleep (DoSL) attack which is a specific kind of denial-of-service attacks designed to drain the energy of battery-powered sensors in a Wireless Sensor Network. This paper explains the development of a new MAC-layer protocol called Layered-MAC aimed at not just energy efficiency but energy protection against DoSL attacks. The protocol is implemented on the OMNET++ and Castalia simulator. The results from the simulation are then compared with two representative existing duty-cycled protocols (Time-out MAC and Sensor-MAC) and significant improvements are present. One of the benefits of the developed protocol is that, not only does it attempt to save energy, but it protects energy from DoSL attacks. There are two main contributions from this research – the first is the additional layer of network metrics (RSSI and LQI) consideration, based on the premise that protection/security is not possible without some form of measurement of assets, and the cluster head rotation which adds an extra layer of energy protection while considering energy efficiency

Investigating Open Issues in Swarm Intelligence for Mitigating Security Threats in MANET

The area of Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET) has being a demanded topic of research for more than a decade because of its attractive communication features associated with various issues. This paper primarily discusses on the security issues, which has been still unsolved after abundant research work. The paper basically stresses on the potential features of Swarm Intelligence (SI) and its associated techniques to mitigate the security issues. Majority of the previous researches based on SI has used Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) or Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) extensively. Elaborated discussion on SI with respect to trust management, authentication, and attack models are made with support of some of the recent studies done in same area. The paper finally concludes by discussing the open issues and problem identification of the review

Trust-based energy efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of a number of distributed sensor nodes that are connected within a specified area. Generally, WSN is used for monitoring purposes and can be applied in many fields including health, environmental and habitat monitoring, weather forecasting, home automation, and in the military. Similar, to traditional wired networks, WSNs require security measures to ensure a trustworthy environment for communication. However, due to deployment scenarios nodes are exposed to physical capture and inclusion of malicious node led to internal network attacks hence providing the reliable delivery of data and trustworthy communication environment is a real challenge. Also, malicious nodes intentionally dropping data packets, spreading false reporting, and degrading the network performance. Trust based security solutions are regarded as a significant measure to improve the sensor network security, integrity, and identification of malicious nodes. Another extremely important issue for WSNs is energy conversation and efficiency, as energy sources and battery capacity are often limited, meaning that the implementation of efficient, reliable data delivery is an equally important consideration that is made more challenging due to the unpredictable behaviour of sensor nodes. Thus, this research aims to develop a trust and energy efficient routing protocol that ensures a trustworthy environment for communication and reliable delivery of data. Firstly, a Belief based Trust Evaluation Scheme (BTES) is proposed that identifies malicious nodes and maintains a trustworthy environment among sensor nodes while reducing the impact of false reporting. Secondly, a State based Energy Calculation Scheme (SECS) is proposed which periodically evaluates node energy levels, leading to increased network lifetime. Finally, as an integrated outcome of these two schemes, a Trust and Energy Efficient Path Selection (TEEPS) protocol has been proposed. The proposed protocol is benchmarked with A Trust-based Neighbour selection system using activation function (AF-TNS), and with A Novel Trust of dynamic optimization (Trust-Doe). The experimental results show that the proposed protocol performs better as compared to existing schemes in terms of throughput (by 40.14%), packet delivery ratio (by 28.91%), and end-to-end delay (by 41.86%). In conclusion, the proposed routing protocol able to identify malicious nodes provides a trustworthy environment and improves network energy efficiency and lifetime

RTDSR protocol for channel attacks prevention in mobile ad hoc ambient intelligence home networks

In ambient intelligence home networks, attacks can be on the home devices or the communication channel. This paper focuses on the channel attacks prevention by proposing Real Time Dynamic Source Routing (RTDSR) protocol. The protocol adopted the observation based cooperation enforcement in ad hoc networks (oceans) and collaborative reputation mechanism built on Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. The RTDSR introduced lookup table on the source, destination and intermediate nodes. It also ensures that data path with high reputation are used for data routing and a monitoring watchdog was introduced to ensure that the next node forward the packet properly. The RTDSR protocol was simulated and benchmarked with DSR protocol considering network throughput, average delay, routing overhead and response time as performance metrics. Simulation result revealed a better performance of RTDSR protocol over existing DSR protocol.Keywords: RTDSR, Ambient, Home network, Channel attacks, Protocol, Packet, OPNE

IoT Security Evolution: Challenges and Countermeasures Review

Internet of Things (IoT) architecture, technologies, applications and security have been recently addressed by a number of researchers. Basically, IoT adds internet connectivity to a system of intelligent devices, machines, objects and/or people. Devices are allowed to automatically collect and transmit data over the Internet, which exposes them to serious attacks and threats. This paper provides an intensive review of IoT evolution with primary focusing on security issues together with the proposed countermeasures. Thus, it outlines the IoT security challenges as a future roadmap of research for new researchers in this domain