Flat Cellular (UMTS) Networks

Traditionally, cellular systems have been built in a hierarchical manner: many specialized cellular access network elements that collectively form a hierarchical cellular system. When 2G and later 3G systems were designed there was a good reason to make system hierarchical: from a cost-perspective it was better to concentrate traffic and to share the cost of processing equipment over a large set of users while keeping the base stations relatively cheap. However, we believe the economic reasons for designing cellular systems in a hierarchical manner have disappeared: in fact, hierarchical architectures hinder future efficient deployments. In this paper, we argue for completely flat cellular wireless systems, which need just one type of specialized network element to provide radio access network (RAN) functionality, supplemented by standard IP-based network elements to form a cellular network. While the reason for building a cellular system in a hierarchical fashion has disappeared, there are other good reasons to make the system architecture flat: (1) as wireless transmission techniques evolve into hybrid ARQ systems, there is less need for a hierarchical cellular system to support spatial diversity; (2) we foresee that future cellular networks are part of the Internet, while hierarchical systems typically use interfaces between network elements that are specific to cellular standards or proprietary. At best such systems use IP as a transport medium, not as a core component; (3) a flat cellular system can be self scaling while a hierarchical system has inherent scaling issues; (4) moving all access technologies to the edge of the network enables ease of converging access technologies into a common packet core; and (5) using an IP common core makes the cellular network part of the Internet

Secure Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to the service providers. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, with each access point (AP) connected to the wired network, in WMNs only a subset of the APs are required to be connected to the wired network. The APs that are connected to the wired network are called the Internet gateways (IGWs), while the APs that do not have wired connections are called the mesh routers (MRs). The MRs are connected to the IGWs using multi-hop communication. The IGWs provide access to conventional clients and interconnect ad hoc, sensor, cellular, and other networks to the Internet. However, most of the existing routing protocols for WMNs are extensions of protocols originally designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and thus they perform sub-optimally. Moreover, most routing protocols for WMNs are designed without security issues in mind, where the nodes are all assumed to be honest. In practical deployment scenarios, this assumption does not hold. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in WMNs and then particularly focuses on secure routing in these networks. First, it identifies security vulnerabilities in the medium access control (MAC) and the network layers. Various possibilities of compromising data confidentiality, data integrity, replay attacks and offline cryptanalysis are also discussed. Then various types of attacks in the MAC and the network layers are discussed. After enumerating the various types of attacks on the MAC and the network layer, the chapter briefly discusses on some of the preventive mechanisms for these attacks.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures, 5 table

Securing The Root: A Proposal For Distributing Signing Authority

Management of the Domain Name System (DNS) root zone file is a uniquely global policy problem. For the Internet to connect everyone, the root must be coordinated and compatible. While authority over the legacy root zone file has been contentious and divisive at times, everyone agrees that the Internet should be made more secure. A newly standardized protocol, DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC), would make the Internet's infrastructure more secure. In order to fully implement DNSSEC, the procedures for managing the DNS root must be revised. Therein lies an opportunity. In revising the root zone management procedures, we can develop a new solution that diminishes the impact of the legacy monopoly held by the U.S. government and avoids another contentious debate over unilateral U.S. control. In this paper we describe the outlines of a new system for the management of a DNSSEC-enabled root. Our proposal distributes authority over securing the root, unlike another recently suggested method, while avoiding the risks and pitfalls of an intergovernmental power sharing scheme

Secure Identification in Social Wireless Networks

The applications based on social networking have brought revolution towards social life and are continuously gaining popularity among the Internet users. Due to the advanced computational resources offered by the innovative hardware and nominal subscriber charges of network operators, most of the online social networks are transforming into the mobile domain by offering exciting applications and games exclusively designed for users on the go. Moreover, the mobile devices are considered more personal as compared to their desktop rivals, so there is a tendency among the mobile users to store sensitive data like contacts, passwords, bank account details, updated calendar entries with key dates and personal notes on their devices. The Project Social Wireless Network Secure Identification (SWIN) is carried out at Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) to explore the practicality of providing the secure mobile social networking portal with advanced security features to tackle potential security threats by extending the existing methods with more innovative security technologies. In addition to the extensive background study and the determination of marketable use-cases with their corresponding security requirements, this thesis proposes a secure identification design to satisfy the security dimensions for both online and offline peers. We have implemented an initial prototype using PHP Socket and OpenSSL library to simulate the secure identification procedure based on the proposed design. The design is in compliance with 3GPP‟s Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA) and our implementation has demonstrated the flexibility of the solution to be applied independently for the applications requiring secure identification. Finally, the thesis provides strong foundation for the advanced implementation on mobile platform in future

IMPLEMENTING PROPOSED IEEE 1588 INTEGRATED SECURITY MECHANISM

The IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol is the industry standard for precise time synchronization, used in applications such as the power grid, telecommunications, and audio-video bridging, among many others. However, the standard\u27s recommendations on how to secure the protocol are lacking, and thus have not been widely adopted. A new revision of IEEE 1588 is currently being developed, which will include revised specifications regarding security. The aim of this thesis is to explore the feasibility of the proposed security mechanism, specifically as it would apply to use in the power grid, through implementation and evaluation. The security mechanism consists of two verification approaches, immediate and delayed; we implemented both approaches on top of PTPd, an existing open source implementation of PTP. We support the immediate verification security approach using manual key management at startup, and we support the delayed verification security approach emulating automated key management for a set of security parameters corresponding to one manually configured time period. In our experiments, we found that added performance cost for both verification approaches was within 30 μs, and PTP synchronization quality remained intact when security was enabled. This work should increase awareness and accelerate the adoption of the proposed security mechanism in the power industry

Robust and secure resource management for automotive cyber-physical systems

2022 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Modern vehicles are examples of complex cyber-physical systems with tens to hundreds of interconnected Electronic Control Units (ECUs) that manage various vehicular subsystems. With the shift towards autonomous driving, emerging vehicles are being characterized by an increase in the number of hardware ECUs, greater complexity of applications (software), and more sophisticated in-vehicle networks. These advances have resulted in numerous challenges that impact the reliability, security, and real-time performance of these emerging automotive systems. Some of the challenges include coping with computation and communication uncertainties (e.g., jitter), developing robust control software, detecting cyber-attacks, ensuring data integrity, and enabling confidentiality during communication. However, solutions to overcome these challenges incur additional overhead, which can catastrophically delay the execution of real-time automotive tasks and message transfers. Hence, there is a need for a holistic approach to a system-level solution for resource management in automotive cyber-physical systems that enables robust and secure automotive system design while satisfying a diverse set of system-wide constraints. ECUs in vehicles today run a variety of automotive applications ranging from simple vehicle window control to highly complex Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) applications. The aggressive attempts of automakers to make vehicles fully autonomous have increased the complexity and data rate requirements of applications and further led to the adoption of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) based techniques for improved perception and control. Additionally, modern vehicles are becoming increasingly connected with various external systems to realize more robust vehicle autonomy. These paradigm shifts have resulted in significant overheads in resource constrained ECUs and increased the complexity of the overall automotive system (including heterogeneous ECUs, network architectures, communication protocols, and applications), which has severe performance and safety implications on modern vehicles. The increased complexity of automotive systems introduces several computation and communication uncertainties in automotive subsystems that can cause delays in applications and messages, resulting in missed real-time deadlines. Missing deadlines for safety-critical automotive applications can be catastrophic, and this problem will be further aggravated in the case of future autonomous vehicles. Additionally, due to the harsh operating conditions (such as high temperatures, vibrations, and electromagnetic interference (EMI)) of automotive embedded systems, there is a significant risk to the integrity of the data that is exchanged between ECUs which can lead to faulty vehicle control. These challenges demand a more reliable design of automotive systems that is resilient to uncertainties and supports data integrity goals. Additionally, the increased connectivity of modern vehicles has made them highly vulnerable to various kinds of sophisticated security attacks. Hence, it is also vital to ensure the security of automotive systems, and it will become crucial as connected and autonomous vehicles become more ubiquitous. However, imposing security mechanisms on the resource constrained automotive systems can result in additional computation and communication overhead, potentially leading to further missed deadlines. Therefore, it is crucial to design techniques that incur very minimal overhead (lightweight) when trying to achieve the above-mentioned goals and ensure the real-time performance of the system. We address these issues by designing a holistic resource management framework called ROSETTA that enables robust and secure automotive cyber-physical system design while satisfying a diverse set of constraints related to reliability, security, real-time performance, and energy consumption. To achieve reliability goals, we have developed several techniques for reliability-aware scheduling and multi-level monitoring of signal integrity. To achieve security objectives, we have proposed a lightweight security framework that provides confidentiality and authenticity while meeting both security and real-time constraints. We have also introduced multiple deep learning based intrusion detection systems (IDS) to monitor and detect cyber-attacks in the in-vehicle network. Lastly, we have introduced novel techniques for jitter management and security management and deployed lightweight IDSs on resource constrained automotive ECUs while ensuring the real-time performance of the automotive systems