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

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

On Message Authentication in 4G LTE System

After decades of evolution, the cellular system has become an indispensable part of modern life. Together with the convenience brought by the cellular system, many security issues have arisen. Message integrity protection is one of the urgent problems. The integrity of a message is usually protected by message authentication code (MAC). Forgery attacks are the primary threat to message integrity. By Simon's definition, forgery is twofold. The first is impersonation forgery, in which the opponent can forge a MAC without knowing any message-MAC pairs. The second is substitution forgery, in which the opponent can forge a MAC by knowing certain message-MAC pairs. In the 4G LTE system, MAC is applied not only to RRC control messages and user data, but also to authentication of the identities in the radio network during the authentication and key agreement (AKA) procedure. There is a set of functions used in AKA, which is called A3/A8. Originally, only one cipher suite called MILENAGE followed the definition of A3/A8. Recently, Vodafone has proposed another candidate called TUAK. This thesis first analyzes a MAC algorithm of the 4G LTE system called EIA1. The analysis shows that because of its linear structure, given two valid message-MAC pairs generated by EIA1, attackers can forge up to $2^{32}$ valid MACs by the algorithm called linear forgery attack proposed in this thesis. This thesis also proposes a well-designed scenario, in which attackers can apply the linear forgery attack to the real system. The second work presented in this thesis fixes the gap between the almost XOR universal property and the substitution forgery probability, and assesses the security of EIA1 under different attack models. After the security analysis, an optimized EIA1 using an efficient polynomial evaluation method is proposed. This polynomial evaluation method is analog to the fast Fourier transform. Compared with Horner's rule, which is used in the official implementation of EIA1, this method reduces the number of multiplications over finite field dramatically. The improvement is shown by the experiment results, which suggests that the optimized code is much faster than the official implementation, and the polynomial evaluation method is better than Horner's rule. The third work in this thesis assesses the security of TUAK, and proves TUAK is a secure algorithm set, which means $f_1$, $f_1^*$, and $f_2$ are resistant to forgery attacks, and key recovery attacks; $f_3$ - $f_5$, and $f_5^*$ are resistant to key recovery attacks and collision. A novel technique called multi-output filtering model is proposed in this work in order to study the non-randomness property of TUAK and other cryptographic primitives, such as AES, KASUMI, and PRESENT. A multi-output filtering model consists of a linear feedback shift register (LFSR) and a multi-output filtering function. The contribution of this research is twofold. First, an attack technique under IND-CPA using the multi-output filtering model is proposed. By introducing a distinguishing function, we theoretically determine the success rate of this attack. In particular, we construct a distinguishing function based on the distribution of the linear complexity of component sequences, and apply it on studying TUAK's $f_1$ algorithm, AES, KASUMI and PRESENT. The experiments demonstrate that the success rate of the attack on KASUMI and PRESENT is non-negligible, but $f_1$ and AES are resistant to this attack. Second, this research studies the distribution of the cryptographic properties of component functions of a random primitive in the multi-output filtering model. The experiments show some non-randomness in the distribution of the algebraic degree and nonlinearity for KASUMI. The last work is constructing two MACs. The first MAC called WGIA-128 is a variant of EIA1, and requires the underlying stream cipher to generate uniform distributed key streams. WG-16, a stream cipher with provable security, is a good choice to be the underlying cipher of WGIA-128 because it satisfies the requirement. The second MAC called AMAC is constructed upon APN functions. we propose two different constructions of AMAC, and both of these two constructions have provable security. The probability of substitution forgery attacks against both constructions of AMAC is upper bounded by a negligible value. Compared with EIA1 and EIA3, two message authentication codes used in the 4G LTE system, both constructions of AMAC are slower than EIA3, but much faster than EIA1. Moreover, both constructions of AMAC are resistant to cycling and linear forgery attacks, which can be applied to both EIA1 and EIA3

Large-scale Wireless Local-area Network Measurement and Privacy Analysis

The edge of the Internet is increasingly becoming wireless. Understanding the wireless edge is therefore important for understanding the performance and security aspects of the Internet experience. This need is especially necessary for enterprise-wide wireless local-area networks (WLANs) as organizations increasingly depend on WLANs for mission- critical tasks. To study a live production WLAN, especially a large-scale network, is a difficult undertaking. Two fundamental difficulties involved are (1) building a scalable network measurement infrastructure to collect traces from a large-scale production WLAN, and (2) preserving user privacy while sharing these collected traces to the network research community. In this dissertation, we present our experience in designing and implementing one of the largest distributed WLAN measurement systems in the United States, the Dartmouth Internet Security Testbed (DIST), with a particular focus on our solutions to the challenges of efficiency, scalability, and security. We also present an extensive evaluation of the DIST system. To understand the severity of some potential trace-sharing risks for an enterprise-wide large-scale wireless network, we conduct privacy analysis on one kind of wireless network traces, a user-association log, collected from a large-scale WLAN. We introduce a machine-learning based approach that can extract and quantify sensitive information from a user-association log, even though it is sanitized. Finally, we present a case study that evaluates the tradeoff between utility and privacy on WLAN trace sanitization

Security of Ubiquitous Computing Systems

The chapters in this open access book arise out of the EU Cost Action project Cryptacus, the objective of which was to improve and adapt existent cryptanalysis methodologies and tools to the ubiquitous computing framework. The cryptanalysis implemented lies along four axes: cryptographic models, cryptanalysis of building blocks, hardware and software security engineering, and security assessment of real-world systems. The authors are top-class researchers in security and cryptography, and the contributions are of value to researchers and practitioners in these domains. This book is open access under a CC BY license

A Hardware Security Solution against Scan-Based Attacks

Scan based Design for Test (DfT) schemes have been widely used to achieve high fault coverage for integrated circuits. The scan technique provides full access to the internal nodes of the device-under-test to control them or observe their response to input test vectors. While such comprehensive access is highly desirable for testing, it is not acceptable for secure chips as it is subject to exploitation by various attacks. In this work, new methods are presented to protect the security of critical information against scan-based attacks. In the proposed methods, access to the circuit containing secret information via the scan chain has been severely limited in order to reduce the risk of a security breach. To ensure the testability of the circuit, a built-in self-test which utilizes an LFSR as the test pattern generator (TPG) is proposed. The proposed schemes can be used as a countermeasure against side channel attacks with a low area overhead as compared to the existing solutions in literature

Resilient networking in wireless sensor networks

This report deals with security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially in network layer. Multiple secure routing protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, they often use the cryptography to secure routing functionalities. The cryptography alone is not enough to defend against multiple attacks due to the node compromise. Therefore, we need more algorithmic solutions. In this report, we focus on the behavior of routing protocols to determine which properties make them more resilient to attacks. Our aim is to find some answers to the following questions. Are there any existing protocols, not designed initially for security, but which already contain some inherently resilient properties against attacks under which some portion of the network nodes is compromised? If yes, which specific behaviors are making these protocols more resilient? We propose in this report an overview of security strategies for WSNs in general, including existing attacks and defensive measures. In this report we focus at the network layer in particular, and an analysis of the behavior of four particular routing protocols is provided to determine their inherent resiliency to insider attacks. The protocols considered are: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Gradient-Based Routing (GBR), Greedy Forwarding (GF) and Random Walk Routing (RWR)

Efficient and Secure Implementations of Lightweight Symmetric Cryptographic Primitives

This thesis is devoted to efficient and secure implementations of lightweight symmetric cryptographic primitives for resource-constrained devices such as wireless sensors and actuators that are typically deployed in remote locations. In this setting, cryptographic algorithms must consume few computational resources and withstand a large variety of attacks, including side-channel attacks. The first part of this thesis is concerned with efficient software implementations of lightweight symmetric algorithms on 8, 16, and 32-bit microcontrollers. A first contribution of this part is the development of FELICS, an open-source benchmarking framework that facilitates the extraction of comparative performance figures from implementations of lightweight ciphers. Using FELICS, we conducted a fair evaluation of the implementation properties of 19 lightweight block ciphers in the context of two different usage scenarios, which are representatives for common security services in the Internet of Things (IoT). This study gives new insights into the link between the structure of a cryptographic algorithm and the performance it can achieve on embedded microcontrollers. Then, we present the SPARX family of lightweight ciphers and describe the impact of software efficiency in the process of shaping three instances of the family. Finally, we evaluate the cost of the main building blocks of symmetric algorithms to determine which are the most efficient ones. The contributions of this part are particularly valuable for designers of lightweight ciphers, software and security engineers, as well as standardization organizations. In the second part of this work, we focus on side-channel attacks that exploit the power consumption or the electromagnetic emanations of embedded devices executing unprotected implementations of lightweight algorithms. First, we evaluate different selection functions in the context of Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) to infer which operations are easy to attack. Second, we show that most implementations of the AES present in popular open-source cryptographic libraries are vulnerable to side-channel attacks such as CPA, even in a network protocol scenario where the attacker has limited control of the input. Moreover, we describe an optimal algorithm for recovery of the master key using CPA attacks. Third, we perform the first electromagnetic vulnerability analysis of Thread, a networking stack designed to facilitate secure communication between IoT devices. The third part of this thesis lies in the area of side-channel countermeasures against power and electromagnetic analysis attacks. We study efficient and secure expressions that compute simple bitwise functions on Boolean shares. To this end, we describe an algorithm for efficient search of expressions that have an optimal cost in number of elementary operations. Then, we introduce optimal expressions for first-order Boolean masking of bitwise AND and OR operations. Finally, we analyze the performance of three lightweight block ciphers protected using the optimal expressions

Técnicas de segurança para a internet das coisas

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaIoT assume que dispositivos limitados, tanto em capacidades computacionais como em energia disponível, façam parte da sua infraestrutura. Dispositivos esses que apresentam menos capacidades e mecanismos de defesa do que as máquinas de uso geral. É imperativo aplicar segurança nesses dispositivos e nas suas comunicações de maneira a prepará-los para as ameaças da Internet e alcançar uma verdadeira e segura Internet das Coisas, em concordância com as visões atuais para o futuro. Esta dissertação pretende ser um pequeno passo nesse sentido, apresentando alternativas para proteger as comunicações de dispositivos restritos numa perspetiva de performance assim como avaliar o desempenho e a ocupação de recursos por parte de primitivas criptográficas quando são aplicadas em dispositivos reais. Dado que a segurança em diversas ocasiões tem de se sujeitar aos recursos deixados após a implementação de funcionalidades, foi colocada uma implementação de exposição de funcionalidades, recorrendo ao uso de CoAP, num dispositivo fabricado com intenção de ser usado em IoT e avaliada de acordo com a sua ocupação de recursos.IoT comprehends devices constrained in both computational capabilities and available energy to be a part of its infrastructure. Devices which also present less defense capabilities and mechanisms than general purpose machines. It’s imperative to secure such devices and their communications in order to prepare them for the Internet menaces and achieve a true and secure Internet of Things compliant with today’s future visions. This dissertation intends to be a small step towards such future by presenting alternatives to protect constrained device’s communications in a performance related perspective as well as benchmarks and evaluation of resources used by cryptographic primitives when implemented on real devices. Due to security being on multiple occasions subjected to the resources available only after functionalities implementation, a minimalist implementation of functionalities exposure through the use of CoAP was also deployed in an IoT intended device and assessed according to resource overhead