867 research outputs found
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
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
Applied Formal Methods in Wireless Sensor Networks
This work covers the application of formal methods to the world of wireless sensor networks. Mainly two different perspectives are analyzed through mathematical models which can be distinct for example into qualitative statements like "Is the system error free?" From the perspective of quantitative propositions we investigate protocol optimal parameter settings for an energy efficient operation
Information Accountability Framework for a Trusted Health Care System
Trusted health care outcomes are patient centric. Requirements to ensure both the quality and sharing of patients’ health records are a key for better clinical decision making. In the context of maintaining quality health, the sharing of data and information between professionals and patients is paramount. This information sharing is a challenge and costly if patients’ trust and institutional accountability are not established. Establishment of an Information Accountability Framework (IAF) is one of the approaches in this paper. The concept behind the IAF requirements are: transparent responsibilities, relevance of the information being used, and the establishment and evidence of accountability that all lead to the desired outcome of a Trusted Health Care System. Upon completion of this IAF framework the trust component between the public and professionals will be constructed. Preservation of the confidentiality and integrity of patients’ information will lead to trusted health care outcomes
A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends
This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the
inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense
mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the
security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity,
confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive
overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in
view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats
are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing
security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless
network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term
evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in
physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open
communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer.
We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their
counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive
jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the
integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and
cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some
technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are
summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201
A Review of the Energy Efficient and Secure Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks
This paper presents a thorough survey of recent work addressing energy
efficient multicast routing protocols and secure multicast routing protocols in
Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). There are so many issues and solutions which
witness the need of energy management and security in ad hoc wireless networks.
The objective of a multicast routing protocol for MANETs is to support the
propagation of data from a sender to all the receivers of a multicast group
while trying to use the available bandwidth efficiently in the presence of
frequent topology changes. Multicasting can improve the efficiency of the
wireless link when sending multiple copies of messages by exploiting the
inherent broadcast property of wireless transmission. Secure multicast routing
plays a significant role in MANETs. However, offering energy efficient and
secure multicast routing is a difficult and challenging task. In recent years,
various multicast routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. These
protocols have distinguishing features and use different mechanismsComment: 15 page
Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks
Wireless sensor networks consist of a large amount of sensor nodes, small low-cost wireless computing devices equipped with different sensors. Sensor networks collect and process environmental data and can be used for habitat monitoring, precision agriculture, wildfire detection, structural health monitoring and many other applications. Securing sensor networks calls for novel solutions, especially because of their unattended deployment and strong resource limitations. Moreover, developing security solutions without knowing precisely against what threats the system should be protected is impossible. Thus, the first task in securing sensor networks is to define a realistic adversary model. We systematically investigate vulnerabilities in sensor networks, specifically focusing on physical attacks on sensor node hardware. These are all attacks that require direct physical access to the sensor nodes. Most severe attacks of this kind are also known as node capture, or node compromise. Based on the vulnerability analysis, we present a novel general adversary model for sensor networks. If the data collected within a sensor network is valuable or should be kept confidential then the data should be protected from unauthorized access. We determine security issues in the context of access control in sensor networks in presence of node capture attacks and develop protocols for broadcast authentication that constitute the core of our solutions for access control. We develop broadcast authentication protocols for the case where the adversary can capture up to some threshold t sensor nodes. The developed protocols offer absolute protection while not more than t nodes are captured, but their security breaks completely otherwise. Moreover, security in this case comes at a high cost, as the resource requirements for the protocols grow rapidly with t. One of the most popular ways to overcome impossibility or inefficiency of solutions in distributed systems is to make the protocol goals probabilistic. We therefore develop efficient probabilistic protocols for broadcast authentication. Security of these protocols degrades gracefully with the increasing number of captured nodes. We conclude that the perfect threshold security is less appropriate for sensor networks than the probabilistic approach. Gracefully degrading security offers better scalability and saves resources, and should be considered as a promising security paradigm for sensor networks
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