Wireless body area network revisited

Rapid growth of wireless body area networks (WBANs) technology allowed the fast and secured acquisition as well as exchange of vast amount of data information in diversified fields. WBANs intend to simplify and improve the speed, accuracy, and reliability of communica-tions from sensors (interior motors) placed on and/or close to the human body, reducing the healthcare cost remarkably. However, the secu-rity of sensitive data transfer using WBANs and subsequent protection from adversaries attack is a major issue. Depending on the types of applications, small and high sensitive sensors having several nodes obtained from invasive/non-invasive micro- and nano- technology can be installed on the human body to capture useful information. Lately, the use of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and integrated circuits in wireless communications (WCs) became widespread because of their low-power operation, intelligence, accuracy, and miniaturi-zation. IEEE 802.15.6 and 802.15.4j standards have already been set to specifically regulate the medical networks and WBANs. In this view, present communication provides an all-inclusive overview of the past development, recent progress, challenges and future trends of security technology related to WBANs

Cognitive Security Framework For Heterogeneous Sensor Network Using Swarm Intelligence

Rapid development of sensor technology has led to applications ranging from academic to military in a short time span. These tiny sensors are deployed in environments where security for data or hardware cannot be guaranteed. Due to resource constraints, traditional security schemes cannot be directly applied. Unfortunately, due to minimal or no communication security schemes, the data, link and the sensor node can be easily tampered by intruder attacks. This dissertation presents a security framework applied to a sensor network that can be managed by a cohesive sensor manager. A simple framework that can support security based on situation assessment is best suited for chaotic and harsh environments. The objective of this research is designing an evolutionary algorithm with controllable parameters to solve existing and new security threats in a heterogeneous communication network. An in-depth analysis of the different threats and the security measures applied considering the resource constrained network is explored. Any framework works best, if the correlated or orthogonal performance parameters are carefully considered based on system goals and functions. Hence, a trade-off between the different performance parameters based on weights from partially ordered sets is applied to satisfy application specific requirements and security measures. The proposed novel framework controls heterogeneous sensor network requirements,and balance the resources optimally and efficiently while communicating securely using a multi-objection function. In addition, the framework can measure the affect of single or combined denial of service attacks and also predict new attacks under both cooperative and non-cooperative sensor nodes. The cognitive intuition of the framework is evaluated under different simulated real time scenarios such as Health-care monitoring, Emergency Responder, VANET, Biometric security access system, and Battlefield monitoring. The proposed three-tiered Cognitive Security Framework is capable of performing situation assessment and performs the appropriate security measures to maintain reliability and security of the system. The first tier of the proposed framework, a crosslayer cognitive security protocol defends the communication link between nodes during denial-of-Service attacks by re-routing data through secure nodes. The cognitive nature of the protocol balances resources and security making optimal decisions to obtain reachable and reliable solutions. The versatility and robustness of the protocol is justified by the results obtained in simulating health-care and emergency responder applications under Sybil and Wormhole attacks. The protocol considers metrics from each layer of the network model to obtain an optimal and feasible resource efficient solution. In the second tier, the emergent behavior of the protocol is further extended to mine information from the nodes to defend the network against denial-of-service attack using Bayesian models. The jammer attack is considered the most vulnerable attack, and therefore simulated vehicular ad-hoc network is experimented with varied types of jammer. Classification of the jammer under various attack scenarios is formulated to predict the genuineness of the attacks on the sensor nodes using receiver operating characteristics. In addition to detecting the jammer attack, a simple technique of locating the jammer under cooperative nodes is implemented. This feature enables the network in isolating the jammer or the reputation of node is affected, thus removing the malicious node from participating in future routes. Finally, a intrusion detection system using `bait\u27 architecture is analyzed where resources is traded-off for the sake of security due to sensitivity of the application. The architecture strategically enables ant agents to detect and track the intruders threateningthe network. The proposed framework is evaluated based on accuracy and speed of intrusion detection before the network is compromised. This process of detecting the intrusion earlier helps learn future attacks, but also serves as a defense countermeasure. The simulated scenarios of this dissertation show that Cognitive Security Framework isbest suited for both homogeneous and heterogeneous sensor networks

Edge-Assisted Vehicular Networks Security.

Política de acceso abierto tomada de: https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/29486?template=romeoEdge Computing paradigms are expected to solve some major problems affecting current application scenarios that rely on Cloud computing resources to operate. These novel paradigms will bring computational resources closer to the users and by doing so they will not only reduce network latency and bandwidth utilization but will also introduce some attractive context-awareness features to these systems. In this paper we show how the enticing features introduced by Edge Computing paradigms can be exploited to improve security and privacy in the critical scenario of vehicular networks (VN), especially existing authentication and revocation issues. In particular, we analyze the security challenges in VN and describe three deployment models for vehicular edge computing, which refrain from using vehicular-to-vehicular communications. The result is that the burden imposed to vehicles is considerably reduced without sacrificing the security or functional features expected in vehicular scenarios

Key management for wireless sensor network security

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have attracted great attention not only in industry but also in academia due to their enormous application potential and unique security challenges. A typical sensor network can be seen as a combination of a number of low-cost sensor nodes which have very limited computation and communication capability, memory space, and energy supply. The nodes are self-organized into a network to sense or monitor surrounding information in an unattended environment, while the self-organization property makes the networks vulnerable to various attacks.Many cryptographic mechanisms that solve network security problems rely directly on secure and efficient key management making key management a fundamental research topic in the field of WSNs security. Although key management for WSNs has been studied over the last years, the majority of the literature has focused on some assumed vulnerabilities along with corresponding countermeasures. Specific application, which is an important factor in determining the feasibility of the scheme, has been overlooked to a large extent in the existing literature.This thesis is an effort to develop a key management framework and specific schemes for WSNs by which different types of keys can be established and also can be distributed in a self-healing manner; explicit/ implicit authentication can be integrated according to the security requirements of expected applications. The proposed solutions would provide reliable and robust security infrastructure for facilitating secure communications in WSNs.There are five main parts in the thesis. In Part I, we begin with an introduction to the research background, problems definition and overview of existing solutions. From Part II to Part IV, we propose specific solutions, including purely Symmetric Key Cryptography based solutions, purely Public Key Cryptography based solutions, and a hybrid solution. While there is always a trade-off between security and performance, analysis and experimental results prove that each proposed solution can achieve the expected security aims with acceptable overheads for some specific applications. Finally, we recapitulate the main contribution of our work and identify future research directions in Part V

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

Towards Secure and Scalable Tag Search approaches for Current and Next Generation RFID Systems

The technology behind Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been around for a while, but dropping tag prices and standardization efforts are finally facilitating the expansion of RFID systems. The massive adoption of this technology is taking us closer to the well known ubiquitous computing scenarios. However, the widespread deployment of RFID technology also gives rise to significant user security issues. One possible solution to these challenges is the use of secure authentication protocols to protect RFID communications. A natural extension of RFID authentication is RFID tag searching, where a reader needs to search for a particular RFID tag out of a large collection of tags. As the number of tags of the system increases, the ability to search for the tags is invaluable when the reader requires data from a few tags rather than all the tags of the system. Authenticating each tag one at a time until the desired tag is found is a time consuming process. Surprisingly, RFID search has not been widely addressed in the literature despite the availability of search capabilities in typical RFID tags. In this thesis, we examine the challenges of extending security and scalability issues to RFID tag search and suggest several solutions. This thesis aims to design RFID tag search protocols that ensure security and scalability using lightweight cryptographic primitives. We identify the security and performance requirements for RFID systems. We also point out and explain the major attacks that are typically launched against an RFID system. This thesis makes four main contributions. First, we propose a serverless (without a central server) and untraceable search protocol that is secure against major attacks we identified earlier. The unique feature of this protocol is that it provides security protection and searching capacity same as an RFID system with a central server. In addition, this approach is no more vulnerable to a single point-of-failure. Second, we propose a scalable tag search protocol that provides most of the identified security and performance features. The highly scalable feature of this protocol allows it to be deployed in large scale RFID systems. Third, we propose a hexagonal cell based distributed architecture for efficient RFID tag searching in an emergency evacuation system. Finally, we introduce tag monitoring as a new dimension of tag searching and propose a Slotted Aloha based scalable tag monitoring protocol for next generation WISP (Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform) tags

Authentication Protocols for Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey

In this paper, a comprehensive survey of authentication protocols for Internet of Things (IoT) is presented. Specifically more than forty authentication protocols developed for or applied in the context of the IoT are selected and examined in detail. These protocols are categorized based on the target environment: (1) Machine to Machine Communications (M2M), (2) Internet of Vehicles (IoV), (3) Internet of Energy (IoE), and (4) Internet of Sensors (IoS). Threat models, countermeasures, and formal security verification techniques used in authentication protocols for the IoT are presented. In addition a taxonomy and comparison of authentication protocols that are developed for the IoT in terms of network model, specific security goals, main processes, computation complexity, and communication overhead are provided. Based on the current survey, open issues are identified and future research directions are proposed

A formal approach toward authenticated authorization without identification

Anonymity is a valued commodity on the Internet many uses take advantage of. Unfortunately, anonymity and credibility are essentially mutually exclusive. A practical method to determine request creditability without also inheriting the capability to identify the exclusive source of a request is not in practice. Previous research efforts have proposed methods to ensure anonymous communication, but most sacrifice either authorization or privacy. We propose a scheme that allows a message sender to prove his or her creditability without also providing any participant capability to identify the source. In addition, the scheme is resists sybil attacks and disjoints correlation of independent message to a similar source