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

Delivering Live Multimedia Streams to Mobile Hosts in a Wireless Internet with Multiple Content Aggregators

We consider the distribution of channels of live multimedia content (e.g., radio or TV broadcasts) via multiple content aggregators. In our work, an aggregator receives channels from content sources and redistributes them to a potentially large number of mobile hosts. Each aggregator can offer a channel in various configurations to cater for different wireless links, mobile hosts, and user preferences. As a result, a mobile host can generally choose from different configurations of the same channel offered by multiple alternative aggregators, which may be available through different interfaces (e.g., in a hotspot). A mobile host may need to handoff to another aggregator once it receives a channel. To prevent service disruption, a mobile host may for instance need to handoff to another aggregator when it leaves the subnets that make up its current aggregator�s service area (e.g., a hotspot or a cellular network).\ud In this paper, we present the design of a system that enables (multi-homed) mobile hosts to seamlessly handoff from one aggregator to another so that they can continue to receive a channel wherever they go. We concentrate on handoffs between aggregators as a result of a mobile host crossing a subnet boundary. As part of the system, we discuss a lightweight application-level protocol that enables mobile hosts to select the aggregator that provides the �best� configuration of a channel. The protocol comes into play when a mobile host begins to receive a channel and when it crosses a subnet boundary while receiving the channel. We show how our protocol can be implemented using the standard IETF session control and description protocols SIP and SDP. The implementation combines SIP and SDP�s offer-answer model in a novel way

Expressive policy based authorization model for resource-constrained device sensors.

Los capítulos II, III y IV están sujetos a confidencialidad por el autor 92 p.Upcoming smart scenarios enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) envision smart objects that expose services that can adapt to user behavior or be managed with the goal of achieving higher productivity, often in multistakeholder applications. In such environments, smart things are cheap sensors (and actuators) and, therefore, constrained devices. However, they are also critical components because of the importance of the provided information. Given that, strong security in general and access control in particular is a must.However, tightness, feasibility and usability of existing access control models do not cope well with the principle of least privilege; they lack both expressiveness and the ability to update the policy to be enforced in the sensors. In fact, (1) traditional access control solutions are not feasible in all constrained devices due their big impact on the performance although they provide the highest effectiveness by means of tightness and flexibility. (2) Recent access control solutions designed for constrained devices can be implemented only in not so constrained ones and lack policy expressiveness in the local authorization enforcement. (3) Access control solutions currently feasible in the most severely constrained devices have been based on authentication and very coarse grained and static policies, scale badly, and lack a feasible policy based access control solution aware of local context of sensors.Therefore, there is a need for a suitable End-to-End (E2E) access control model to provide fine grained authorization services in service oriented open scenarios, where operation and management access is by nature dynamic and that integrate massively deployed constrained but manageable sensors. Precisely, the main contribution of this thesis is the specification of such a highly expressive E2E access control model suitable for all sensors including the most severely constrained ones. Concretely, the proposed E2E access control model consists of three main foundations. (1) A hybrid architecture, which combines advantages of both centralized and distributed architectures to enable multi-step authorization. Fine granularity of the enforcement is enabled by (2) an efficient policy language and codification, which are specifically defined to gain expressiveness in the authorization policies and to ensure viability in very-constrained devices. The policy language definition enables both to make granting decisions based on local context conditions, and to react accordingly to the requests by the execution of additional tasks defined as obligations.The policy evaluation and enforcement is performed not only during the security association establishment but also afterward, while such security association is in use. Moreover, this novel model provides also control over access behavior, since iterative re-evaluation of the policy is enabled during each individual resource access.Finally, (3) the establishment of an E2E security association between two mutually authenticated peers through a security protocol named Hidra. Such Hidra protocol, based on symmetric key cryptography, relies on the hybrid three-party architecture to enable multi-step authorization as well as the instant provisioning of a dynamic security policy in the sensors. Hidra also enables delegated accounting and audit trail. Proposed access control features cope with tightness, feasibility and both dimensions of usability such as scalability and manageability, which are the key unsolved challenges in the foreseen open and dynamic scenarios enabled by IoT. Related to efficiency, the high compression factor of the proposed policy codification and the optimized Hidra security protocol relying on a symmetric cryptographic schema enable the feasibility as it is demonstrated by the validation assessment. Specifically, the security evaluation and both the analytical and experimental performance evaluation demonstrate the feasibility and adequacy of the proposed protocol and access control model.Concretely, the security validation consists of the assessment that the Hidra security protocol meets the security goals of mutual strong authentication, fine-grained authorization, confidentiality and integrity of secret data and accounting. The security analysis of Hidra conveys on the one hand, how the design aspects of the message exchange contribute to the resilience against potential attacks. On the other hand, a formal security validation supported by a software tool named AVISPA ensures the absence of flaws and the correctness of the design of Hidra.The performance validation is based on an analytical performance evaluation and a test-bed implementation of the proposed access control model for the most severely constrained devices. The key performance factor is the length of the policy instance, since it impacts proportionally on the three critical parameters such as the delay, energy consumption, memory footprint and therefore, on the feasibility.Attending to the obtained performance measures, it can be concluded that the proposed policy language keeps such balance since it enables expressive policy instances but always under limited length values. Additionally, the proposed policy codification improves notably the performance of the protocol since it results in the best policy length compression factor compared with currently existing and adopted standards.Therefore, the assessed access control model is the first approach to bring to severely constrained devices a similar expressiveness level for enforcement and accounting as in current Internet. The positive performance evaluation concludes the feasibility and suitability of this access control model, which notably rises the security features on severely constrained devices for the incoming smart scenarios.Additionally, there is no comparable impact assessment of policy expressiveness of any other access control model. That is, the presented analysis models as well as results might be a reference for further analysis and benchmarkingGaur egun darabilzkigun hainbeste gailutan mikroprozesadoreak daude txertatuta, eragiten duten prozesuan neurketak egin eta logika baten ondorioz ekiteko. Horretarako, bai sentsoreak eta baita aktuadoreak erabiltzen dira (hemendik aurrera, komunitatean onartuta dagoenez, sentsoreak esango diegu nahiz eta erabilpen biak izan). Orain arteko erabilpen zabalenetako konekzio motak, banaka edota sare lokaletan konekatuta izan dira. Era honetan, sentsoreak elkarlanean elkarreri eraginez edota zerbitzari nagusi baten agindupean, erakunde baten prozesuak ahalbideratu eta hobetzeko erabili izan dira.Internet of Things (IoT) deritzonak, sentsoreak dituzten gailuak Internet sarearen bidez konektatu eta prozesu zabalagoak eta eraginkorragoak ahalbidetzen ditu. Smartcity, Smartgrid, Smartfactory eta bestelako smart adimendun ekosistemak, gaur egun dauden eta datozen komunikaziorako teknologien aukerak baliatuz, erabilpen berriak ahalbideratu eta eragina areagotzea dute helburu.Era honetan, ekosistema hauek zabalak dira, eremu ezberdinetako erakundeek hartzen dute parte, eta berariazko sentsoreak dituzten gailuen kopurua izugarri handia da. Sentsoreak beraz, berariazkoak, merkeak eta txikiak dira, eta orain arteko lehenengo erabilpen nagusia, magnitude fisikoren bat neurtzea eta neurketa hauek zerbitzari zentralizatu batera bidaltzea izan da. Hau da, inguruan gertatzen direnak neurtu, eta zerbitzari jakin bati neurrien datuak aldiro aldiro edota atari baten baldintzapean igorri. Zerbitzariak logika aplikatu eta sistema osoa adimendun moduan jardungo du. Jokabide honetan, aurretik ezagunak diren entitateen arteko komunikazioen segurtasuna bermatzearen kexka, nahiz eta Internetetik pasatu, hein onargarri batean ebatzita dago gaur egun.Baina adimendun ekosistema aurreratuak sentsoreengandik beste jokabide bat ere aurreikusten dute. Sentsoreek eurekin harremanak izateko moduko zerbitzuak ere eskaintzen dituzte. Erakunde baten prozesuetan, beste jatorri bateko erakundeekin elkarlanean, jokabide honen erabilpen nagusiak bi dira. Batetik, prozesuan parte hartzen duen erabiltzaileak (eta jabeak izan beharrik ez duenak) inguruarekin harremanak izan litzake, eta bere ekintzetan gailuak bere berezitasunetara egokitzearen beharrizana izan litzake. Bestetik, sentsoreen jarduera eta mantenimendua zaintzen duten teknikariek, beroriek egokitzeko zerbitzuen beharrizana izan dezakete.Holako harremanak, sentsoreen eta erabiltzaileen kokalekua zehaztugabea izanik, kasu askotan Internet bidez eta zuzenak (end-to-end) izatea aurreikusten da. Hau da, sentsore txiki asko daude handik hemendik sistemaren adimena ahalbidetuz, eta harreman zuzenetarako zerbitzu ñimiñoak eskainiz. Batetik, zerbitzu zuzena, errazagoa eta eraginkorragoa dena, bestetik erronkak ere baditu. Izan ere, sentsoreak hain txikiak izanik, ezin dituzte gaur egungo protokolo eta mekanismo estandarak gauzatu. Beraz, sare mailatik eta aplikazio mailarainoko berariazko protokoloak sortzen ari dira.Tamalez, protokolo hauek arinak izatea dute helburu eta segurtasuna ez dute behar den moduan aztertu eta gauzatzen. Eta egon badaude berariazko sarbide kontrolerako ereduak baina baliabideen urritasuna dela eta, ez dira ez zorrotzak ez kudeagarriak. Are gehiago, Gartnerren arabera, erabilpen aurreratuetan inbertsioa gaur egun mugatzen duen traba Nagusia segurtasunarekiko mesfidantza da.Eta hauxe da erronka eta tesi honek landu duen gaia: batetik sentsoreak hain txikiak izanik, eta baliabideak hain urriak (10kB RAM, 100 kB Flash eta bateriak, sentsore txikienetarikoetan), eta bestetik Internet sarea hain zabala eta arriskutsua izanik, segurtasuna areagotuko duen sarbide zuzenaren kontrolerako eredu zorrotz, arin eta kudeagarri berri bat zehaztu eta bere erabilgarritasuna aztertu

Context transfer support for mobility management in all-IP networks.

This thesis is a description of the research undertaken in the course of the PhD and evolves around a context transfer protocol which aims to complement and support mobility management in next generation mobile networks. Based on the literature review, it was identified that there is more to mobility management than handover management and the successful change of routing paths. Supportive mechanisms like fast handover, candidate access router discovery and context transfer can significantly contribute towards achieving seamless handover which is especially important in the case of real time services. The work focused on context transfer motivated by the fact that it could offer great benefits to session re-establishment during the handover operation of a mobile user and preliminary testbed observations illustrated the need for achieving this. Context transfer aims to minimize the impact of certain transport, routing, security-related services on the handover performance. When a mobile node (MN) moves to a new subnet it needs to continue such services that have already been established at the previous subnet. Examples of such services include AAA profile, IPsec state, header compression, QoS policy etc. Re-establishing these services at the new subnet will require a considerable amount of time for the protocol exchanges and as a result time- sensitive real-time traffic will suffer during this time. By transferring state to the new domain candidate services will be quickly re-established. This would also contribute to the seamless operation of application streams and could reduce susceptibility to errors. Furthermore, re-initiation to and from the mobile node will be avoided hence wireless bandwidth efficiency will be conserved. In this research an extension to mobility protocols was proposed for supporting state forwarding capabilities. The idea of forwarding states was also explored for remotely reconfiguring middleboxes to avoid any interruption of a mobile users' sessions or services. Finally a context transfer module was proposed to facilitate the integration of such a mechanism in next generation architectures. The proposals were evaluated analytically, via simulations or via testbed implementation depending on the scenario investigated. The results demonstrated that the proposed solutions can minimize the impact of security services like authentication, authorization and firewalls on a mobile user's multimedia sessions and thus improving the overall handover performance

Cloud Computing in VANETs: Architecture, Taxonomy, and Challenges

Cloud Computing in VANETs (CC-V) has been investigated into two major themes of research including Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) and Vehicle using Cloud (VuC). VCC is the realization of autonomous cloud among vehicles to share their abundant resources. VuC is the efficient usage of conventional cloud by on-road vehicles via a reliable Internet connection. Recently, number of advancements have been made to address the issues and challenges in VCC and VuC. This paper qualitatively reviews CC-V with the emphasis on layered architecture, network component, taxonomy, and future challenges. Specifically, a four-layered architecture for CC-V is proposed including perception, co-ordination, artificial intelligence and smart application layers. Three network component of CC-V namely, vehicle, connection and computation are explored with their cooperative roles. A taxonomy for CC-V is presented considering major themes of research in the area including design of architecture, data dissemination, security, and applications. Related literature on each theme are critically investigated with comparative assessment of recent advances. Finally, some open research challenges are identified as future issues. The challenges are the outcome of the critical and qualitative assessment of literature on CC-V

Evaluating IP security on lightweight hardware

TCP/IP communications stack is being increasingly used to interconnect mobile phones, PDAs, sensor motes and other wireless embedded devices. Although the core functionality of communications protocols has been successfully adopted to lightweight hardware from the traditional Internet and desktop computers, suitability of strong security mechanisms on such devices remains questionable. Insufficient processor, memory and battery resources, as well as constraints of wireless communications limit the applicability of many existing security protocols that involve computationally intensive operations. Varying capabilities of devices and application scenarios with different security and operational requirements complicate the situation further and call for agile and flexible security systems. This study does an empirical evaluation of applicability of selected existing IP security mechanisms to lightweight (resource-constrained) devices. In particular, we evaluate various components of the Host Identity Protocol (HIP), standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force for achieving authentication, shared key negotiation, secure mobility and multihoming and, if used with IPsec, integrity and confidentiality of user data. Involving a set of cryptographic operations, HIP might easily stress a lightweight client, while affecting performance of applications running on it and shortening battery lifetime of the device. We present a background and related work on network-layer security, as well as a set of measurement results of various security components obtained on devices representing lightweight hardware: embedded Linux PDAs, Symbian-based smartphones, OpenWrt Wi-Fi access routers and wireless sensor platforms. To improve computational and energy efficiency of HIP, we evaluate several lightweight mechanisms that can substitute standard protocol components and provide a good trade-off between security and performance in particular application scenarios. We describe cases where existing HIP security mechanisms (i) can be used unmodified and (ii) should be tailored or replaced to suit resource-constrained environments. The combination of presented security components and empirical results on their applicability can serve as a reference framework for building adaptable and flexible security services for future lightweight communication systems