On the Security of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Protocol

Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is the communications protocol currently being rolled out as part of next generation air transportation systems. As the heart of modern air traffic control, it will play an essential role in the protection of two billion passengers per year, besides being crucial to many other interest groups in aviation. The inherent lack of security measures in the ADS-B protocol has long been a topic in both the aviation circles and in the academic community. Due to recently published proof-of-concept attacks, the topic is becoming ever more pressing, especially with the deadline for mandatory implementation in most airspaces fast approaching. This survey first summarizes the attacks and problems that have been reported in relation to ADS-B security. Thereafter, it surveys both the theoretical and practical efforts which have been previously conducted concerning these issues, including possible countermeasures. In addition, the survey seeks to go beyond the current state of the art and gives a detailed assessment of security measures which have been developed more generally for related wireless networks such as sensor networks and vehicular ad hoc networks, including a taxonomy of all considered approaches.Comment: Survey, 22 Pages, 21 Figure

Low cost underwater acoustic localization

Over the course of the last decade, the cost of marine robotic platforms has significantly decreased. In part this has lowered the barriers to entry of exploring and monitoring larger areas of the earth's oceans. However, these advances have been mostly focused on autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) or shallow water autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). One of the main drivers for high cost in the deep water domain is the challenge of localizing such vehicles using acoustics. A low cost one-way travel time underwater ranging system is proposed to assist in localizing deep water submersibles. The system consists of location aware anchor buoys at the surface and underwater nodes. This paper presents a comparison of methods together with details on the physical implementation to allow its integration into a deep sea micro AUV currently in development. Additional simulation results show error reductions by a factor of three.Comment: 73rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of Americ

Coordinated control of mixed robot and sensor networks in distributed area exploration

Recent advancements in wireless communication and electronics has enabled the development of multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate untethered in short distances. In the last decade, significant advantages have been made in the field of robotics, and robots have become more feasible in systems design. Therefore, we trust that a number of open problems with wireless sensor networks can be solved or diminished by including mobility capabilities in agents

Vehicular Networks and Outdoor Pedestrian Localization

This thesis focuses on vehicular networks and outdoor pedestrian localization. In particular, it targets secure positioning in vehicular networks and pedestrian localization for safety services in outdoor environments. The former research topic must cope with three major challenges, concerning users’ privacy, computational costs of security and the system trust on user correctness. This thesis addresses those issues by proposing a new lightweight privacy-preserving framework for continuous tracking of vehicles. The proposed solution is evaluated in both dense and sparse vehicular settings through simulation and experiments in real-world testbeds. In addition, this thesis explores the benefit given by the use of low frequency bands for the transmission of control messages in vehicular networks. The latter topic is motivated by a significant number of traffic accidents with pedestrians distracted by their smartphones. This thesis proposes two different localization solutions specifically for pedestrian safety: a GPS-based approach and a shoe-mounted inertial sensor method. The GPS-based solution is more suitable for rural and suburban areas while it is not applicable in dense urban environments, due to large positioning errors. Instead the inertial sensor approach overcomes the limitations of previous technique in urban environments. Indeed, by exploiting accelerometer data, this architecture is able to precisely detect the transitions from safe to potentially unsafe walking locations without the need of any absolute positioning systems

A Novel Method of Enhancing Security Solutions and Energy Efficiency of IoT Protocols

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET’s) are wireless networks that are capable of operating without any fixed infrastructure. MANET routing protocols must adhere to strict secrecy, integrity, availability and non-repudiation criteria. In MANETs, attacks are roughly categorised into two types: active and passive. An active attack attempts to modify or remove data being transferred across a network. On the other hand, passive attack does not modify or erase the data being sent over the network. The majority of routing protocols for MANETs were built with little regard for security and are therefore susceptible to a variety of assaults. Routing technologies such as AODV and dynamic source routing are quite common. Both however are susceptible to a variety of network layer attacks, including black holes, wormholes, rushing, byzantine, information disclosure. The mobility of the nodes and the open architecture in which the nodes are free to join or leave the network keep changing the topology of the network. The routing in such scenarios becomes a challenging task since it has to take into account the constraints of resources of mobile devices. In this  an analysis of these protocols indicates that, though proactive routing protocols maintain a route to every destination and have low latency, they suffer from high routing overheads and inability to keep up with the dynamic topology in a large sized network. The reactive routing protocols in contrast have low routing overheads, better throughput and higher packet delivery ratio. AODVACO-PSO-DHKE Methodology boosts throughput by 10% while reducing routing overhead by 7%, latency by 8% and energy consumption by 5%. To avoid nodes always being on, a duty cycle procedure that's also paired with the hybrid method is used ACO-FDR PSO is applied to a 100-node network and NS-3 is used to measure various metrics such as throughput, latency, overhead, energy consumption and packet delivery ratio

A Novel Method of Enhancing Security Solutions and Energy Efficiency of IoT Protocols

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET’s) are wireless networks that are capable of operating without any fixed infrastructure. MANET routing protocols must adhere to strict secrecy, integrity, availability and non-repudiation criteria. In MANETs, attacks are roughly categorised into two types: active and passive. An active attack attempts to modify or remove data being transferred across a network. On the other hand, passive attack does not modify or erase the data being sent over the network. The majority of routing protocols for MANETs were built with little regard for security and are therefore susceptible to a variety of assaults. Routing technologies such as AODV and dynamic source routing are quite common. Both however are susceptible to a variety of network layer attacks, including black holes, wormholes, rushing, byzantine, information disclosure. The mobility of the nodes and the open architecture in which the nodes are free to join or leave the network keep changing the topology of the network. The routing in such scenarios becomes a challenging task since it has to take into account the constraints of resources of mobile devices. In this an analysis of these protocols indicates that, though proactive routing protocols maintain a route to every destination and have low latency, they suffer from high routing overheads and inability to keep up with the dynamic topology in a large sized network. The reactive routing protocols in contrast have low routing overheads, better throughput and higher packet delivery ratio. AODVACO-PSO-DHKE Methodology boosts throughput by 10% while reducing routing overhead by 7%, latency by 8% and energy consumption by 5%. To avoid nodes always being on, a duty cycle procedure that's also paired with the hybrid method is used ACO-FDR PSO is applied to a 100-node network and NS-3 is used to measure various metrics such as throughput, latency, overhead, energy consumption and packet delivery ratio

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