Configurable Secured Adaptive Routing Protocol for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper aims at designing, building, and simulating a secured routing protocol to defend against packet dropping attacks in mobile WSNs (MWSNs). This research addresses the gap in the literature by proposing Configurable Secured Adaptive Routing Protocol (CSARP). CSARP has four levels of protection to allow suitability for different types of network applications. The protocol allows the network admin to configure the required protection level and the ratio of cluster heads to all nodes. The protocol has an adaptive feature, which allows for better protection and preventing the spread of the threats in the network. The conducted CSARP simulations with different conditions showed the ability of CSARP to identify all malicious nodes and remove them from the network. CSARP provided more than 99.97% packets delivery rate with 0% data packet loss in the existence of 3 malicious nodes in comparison with 3.17% data packet loss without using CSARP. When compared with LEACH, CSARP showed an improvement in extending the lifetime of the network by up to 39.5%. The proposed protocol has proven to be better than the available security solutions in terms of configurability, adaptability, optimization for MWSNs, energy consumption optimization, and the suitability for different MWSNs applications and conditions

A COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY ON DETECTING BLACK HOLE ATTACK IN MOBILE AD-HOC NETWORK (MANET)

The infrastructure-less nature and mobility of nodes in mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) make it to be very susceptible to various attacks. Besides, owing to its flexibility and simplicity, there is no predefined time or permission set for nodes to leave or join the network and each node can act as a client or server.  Nevertheless, securing communication between nodes has become a challenging problem than in other types of network. Attacks in MANET range into different categories. Black hole attack is one of the attacks that has been addressed by many researchers in the recent years. It does occur when a harmful mobile node called black hole becomes a part of the network and tries to use its malicious behaviors by sending fake route reply packets (RREP) for any received route request packets (RREQ). When these faked packets arrive to the source node, it does reply to them by sending data packet via the established route. Once the packets are received by the black hole, it drops them before reaching the destination.  Hence, preventing the source node from reaching the intended destination. In this paper, we present an overview of a wide range of techniques suggested in the literature for detecting and preventing black hole attacks in mobile ad hoc network. Additionally, the effect of each approach on the network performance is also presented

Hiding in Plain Sight: A Longitudinal Study of Combosquatting Abuse

Domain squatting is a common adversarial practice where attackers register domain names that are purposefully similar to popular domains. In this work, we study a specific type of domain squatting called "combosquatting," in which attackers register domains that combine a popular trademark with one or more phrases (e.g., betterfacebook[.]com, youtube-live[.]com). We perform the first large-scale, empirical study of combosquatting by analyzing more than 468 billion DNS records---collected from passive and active DNS data sources over almost six years. We find that almost 60% of abusive combosquatting domains live for more than 1,000 days, and even worse, we observe increased activity associated with combosquatting year over year. Moreover, we show that combosquatting is used to perform a spectrum of different types of abuse including phishing, social engineering, affiliate abuse, trademark abuse, and even advanced persistent threats. Our results suggest that combosquatting is a real problem that requires increased scrutiny by the security community.Comment: ACM CCS 1

Bootstrapping Real-world Deployment of Future Internet Architectures

The past decade has seen many proposals for future Internet architectures. Most of these proposals require substantial changes to the current networking infrastructure and end-user devices, resulting in a failure to move from theory to real-world deployment. This paper describes one possible strategy for bootstrapping the initial deployment of future Internet architectures by focusing on providing high availability as an incentive for early adopters. Through large-scale simulation and real-world implementation, we show that with only a small number of adopting ISPs, customers can obtain high availability guarantees. We discuss design, implementation, and evaluation of an availability device that allows customers to bridge into the future Internet architecture without modifications to their existing infrastructure

A survey of potential security issues in existing wireless sensor network protocols

The increasing pervasiveness of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in diverse application domains including critical infrastructure systems, sets an extremely high security bar in the design of WSN systems to exploit their full benefits, increasing trust while avoiding loss. Nevertheless, a combination of resource restrictions and the physical exposure of sensor devices inevitably cause such networks to be vulnerable to security threats, both external and internal. While several researchers have provided a set of open problems and challenges in WSN security and privacy, there is a gap in the systematic study of the security implications arising from the nature of existing communication protocols in WSNs. Therefore, we have carried out a deep-dive into the main security mechanisms and their effects on the most popular protocols and standards used in WSN deployments, i.e., IEEE 802.15.4, Berkeley media access control for low-power sensor networks, IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks, outing protocol for routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL), backpressure collection protocol, collection tree protocol, and constrained application protocol, where potential security threats and existing countermeasures are discussed at each layer of WSN stack. This paper culminates in a deeper analysis of network layer attacks deployed against the RPL routing protocol. We quantify the impact of individual attacks on the performance of a network using the Cooja network simulator. Finally, we discuss new research opportunities in network layer security and how to use Cooja as a benchmark for developing new defenses for WSN systems