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

Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT

The recent development in wireless networks and devices has led to novel services that will utilize wireless communication on a new level. Much effort and resources have been dedicated to establishing new communication networks that will support machine-to-machine communication and the Internet of Things (IoT). In these systems, various smart and sensory devices are deployed and connected, enabling large amounts of data to be streamed. Smart services represent new trends in mobile services, i.e., a completely new spectrum of context-aware, personalized, and intelligent services and applications. A variety of existing services utilize information about the position of the user or mobile device. The position of mobile devices is often achieved using the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) chips that are integrated into all modern mobile devices (smartphones). However, GNSS is not always a reliable source of position estimates due to multipath propagation and signal blockage. Moreover, integrating GNSS chips into all devices might have a negative impact on the battery life of future IoT applications. Therefore, alternative solutions to position estimation should be investigated and implemented in IoT applications. This Special Issue, “Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT” aims to report on some of the recent research efforts on this increasingly important topic. The twelve accepted papers in this issue cover various aspects of Smart Sensor Technologies for IoT

Security Analysis of a Blockchain Network

Blockchains have gained popularity due to their versatility and wide range of application. Blockchains are a decentralized data structure guaranteeing integrity and non-repudiation of data We use this to secure provenance meta-data. A blockchain can be seen as a distributed database, or a public ledger of transactions or digital events that have occurred and have been shared among participating parties. A consensus is required to verify each transaction. Blockchains are finding use in cryptocurrencies, academics, clinical trials, healthcare and agriculture. However, like other networks, we need to verify the robustness and availability of the blockchain networks. In this thesis, we leverage existing Denial of Service and Distributed Denial of Service [D/DoS] attacks as a tool to evaluate our proposed blockchain technology, Scrybe, for robustness. First, we check its performance in presence of Transmission Control Protocol [TCP]- based flooding attacks such as SYN Flooding and its variants. We also optimize TCP kernel parameters to improve the utility of syn cookies as a measure against SYN floods. Second, we evaluate malicious miner attempts to exclude client transactions by stalling the mining process and verify that consensus is reached as long as there is at least one honest miner in the network. The underlying algorithm of Scrybe is our novel Lightweight Mining [LWM] algorithm. Our technology guarantees the properties of data integrity and non-repudiation with minimal resource requirements. It introduces a way to mine new blocks in the blockchain, which is not a resource hungry Proof-of-Work [PoW] as required in many present-day cryptocurrency applications

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Being infrastructure-less and without central administration control, wireless ad-hoc networking is playing a more and more important role in extending the coverage of traditional wireless infrastructure (cellular networks, wireless LAN, etc). This book includes state-of the-art techniques and solutions for wireless ad-hoc networks. It focuses on the following topics in ad-hoc networks: vehicular ad-hoc networks, security and caching, TCP in ad-hoc networks and emerging applications. It is targeted to provide network engineers and researchers with design guidelines for large scale wireless ad hoc networks

Wireless Sensor Networks

The aim of this book is to present few important issues of WSNs, from the application, design and technology points of view. The book highlights power efficient design issues related to wireless sensor networks, the existing WSN applications, and discusses the research efforts being undertaken in this field which put the reader in good pace to be able to understand more advanced research and make a contribution in this field for themselves. It is believed that this book serves as a comprehensive reference for graduate and undergraduate senior students who seek to learn latest development in wireless sensor networks

Intelligent Sensor Networks

In the last decade, wireless or wired sensor networks have attracted much attention. However, most designs target general sensor network issues including protocol stack (routing, MAC, etc.) and security issues. This book focuses on the close integration of sensing, networking, and smart signal processing via machine learning. Based on their world-class research, the authors present the fundamentals of intelligent sensor networks. They cover sensing and sampling, distributed signal processing, and intelligent signal learning. In addition, they present cutting-edge research results from leading experts

Self-organization and management of wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a newly deployed networking technology consisting of multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate over short distances. These sensor nodes are mainly in large numbers and are densely deployed either inside the phenomenon or very close to it. They can be used for various application areas (e.g. health, military, home). WSNs provide several advantages over traditional networks, such as large-scale deployment, highresolution sensed data, and application adaptive mechanisms. However, due to their unique characteristics (having dynamic topology, ad-hoc and unattended deployment, huge amount of data generation and traffic flow, limited bandwidth and energy), WSNs pose considerable challenges for network management and make application development nontrivial. Management of wireless sensor networks is extremely important in order to keep the whole network and application work properly and continuously. Despite the importance of sensor network management, there is no generalize solution available for managing and controlling these resource constrained WSNs. In network management of WSNs, energy-efficient network selforganization is one of the main challenging issues. Self-organization is the property which the sensor nodes must have to organize themselves to form the network. Selforganization of WSNs is challenging because of the tight constraints on the bandwidth and energy resources available in these networks. A self organized sensor network can be clustered or grouped into an easily manageable network. However, existing clustering schemes offer various limitations. For example, existing clustering schemes consume too much energy in cluster formation and re-formation. This thesis presents a novel cellular self-organizing hierarchical architecture for wireless sensor networks. The cellular architecture extends the network life time by efficiently utilizing nodes energy and support the scalability of the system. We have analyzed the performance of the architecture analytically and by simulations. The results obtained from simulation have shown that our cellular architecture is more energy efficient and achieves better energy consumption distribution. The cellular architecture is then mapped into a management framework to support the network management system for resource constraints WSNs. The management framework is self-managing and robust to changes in the network. It is application-co-operative and optimizes itself to support the unique requirements of each application. The management framework consists of three core functional areas i.e., configuration management, fault management, and mobility management. For configuration management, we have developed a re-configuration algorithm to support sensor networks to energy-efficiently re-form the network topology due to network dynamics i.e. node dying, node power on and off, new node joining the network and cells merging. In the area of fault management we have developed a new fault management mechanism to detect failing nodes and recover the connectivity in WSNs. For mobility management, we have developed a two phase sensor relocation solution: redundant mobile sensors are first identified and then relocated to the target location to deal with coverage holes. All the three functional areas have been evaluated and compared against existing solutions. Evaluation results show a significant improvement in terms of re-configuration, failure detection and recovery, and sensors relocation

Security and privacy issues in implantable medical devices: A comprehensive survey

Bioengineering is a field in expansion. New technologies are appearing to provide a more efficient treatment of diseases or human deficiencies. Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) constitute one example, these being devices with more computing, decision making and communication capabilities. Several research works in the computer security field have identified serious security and privacy risks in IMDs that could compromise the implant and even the health of the patient who carries it. This article surveys the main security goals for the next generation of IMDs and analyzes the most relevant protection mechanisms proposed so far. On the one hand, the security proposals must have into consideration the inherent constraints of these small and implanted devices: energy, storage and computing power. On the other hand, proposed solutions must achieve an adequate balance between the safety of the patient and the security level offered, with the battery lifetime being another critical parameter in the design phase