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

Remote software upload techniques in future vehicles and their performance analysis

Updating software in vehicle Electronic Control Units (ECUs) will become a mandatory requirement for a variety of reasons, for examples, to update/fix functionality of an existing system, add new functionality, remove software bugs and to cope up with ITS infrastructure. Software modules of advanced vehicles can be updated using Remote Software Upload (RSU) technique. The RSU employs infrastructure-based wireless communication technique where the software supplier sends the software to the targeted vehicle via a roadside Base Station (BS). However, security is critically important in RSU to avoid any disasters due to malfunctions of the vehicle or to protect the proprietary algorithms from hackers, competitors or people with malicious intent. In this thesis, a mechanism of secure software upload in advanced vehicles is presented which employs mutual authentication of the software provider and the vehicle using a pre-shared authentication key before sending the software. The software packets are sent encrypted with a secret key along with the Message Digest (MD). In order to increase the security level, it is proposed the vehicle to receive more than one copy of the software along with the MD in each copy. The vehicle will install the new software only when it receives more than one identical copies of the software. In order to validate the proposition, analytical expressions of average number of packet transmissions for successful software update is determined. Different cases are investigated depending on the vehicle\u27s buffer size and verification methods. The analytical and simulation results show that it is sufficient to send two copies of the software to the vehicle to thwart any security attack while uploading the software. The above mentioned unicast method for RSU is suitable when software needs to be uploaded to a single vehicle. Since multicasting is the most efficient method of group communication, updating software in an ECU of a large number of vehicles could benefit from it. However, like the unicast RSU, the security requirements of multicast communication, i.e., authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of the software transmitted and access control of the group members is challenging. In this thesis, an infrastructure-based mobile multicasting for RSU in vehicle ECUs is proposed where an ECU receives the software from a remote software distribution center using the road side BSs as gateways. The Vehicular Software Distribution Network (VSDN) is divided into small regions administered by a Regional Group Manager (RGM). Two multicast Group Key Management (GKM) techniques are proposed based on the degree of trust on the BSs named Fully-trusted (FT) and Semi-trusted (ST) systems. Analytical models are developed to find the multicast session establishment latency and handover latency for these two protocols. The average latency to perform mutual authentication of the software vendor and a vehicle, and to send the multicast session key by the software provider during multicast session initialization, and the handoff latency during multicast session is calculated. Analytical and simulation results show that the link establishment latency per vehicle of our proposed schemes is in the range of few seconds and the ST system requires few ms higher time than the FT system. The handoff latency is also in the range of few seconds and in some cases ST system requires less handoff time than the FT system. Thus, it is possible to build an efficient GKM protocol without putting too much trust on the BSs

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

Survey on Lightweight Primitives and Protocols for RFID in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is becoming widespread in all kind of wireless network-based applications. As expected, applications based on sensor networks, ad-hoc or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be highly benefited from the adoption of RFID solutions. There is a strong need to employ lightweight cryptographic primitives for many security applications because of the tight cost and constrained resource requirement of sensor based networks. This paper mainly focuses on the security analysis of lightweight protocols and algorithms proposed for the security of RFID systems. A large number of research solutions have been proposed to implement lightweight cryptographic primitives and protocols in sensor and RFID integration based resource constraint networks. In this work, an overview of the currently discussed lightweight primitives and their attributes has been done. These primitives and protocols have been compared based on gate equivalents (GEs), power, technology, strengths, weaknesses and attacks. Further, an integration of primitives and protocols is compared with the possibilities of their applications in practical scenarios

Security of Group Key Exchange Protocols with Different Passwords

Password-based authenticated group key exchange protocols allow group users to jointly share a session key based on a human-memorizable password. In this paper, we present an undetectable online dictionary attack on N-EKE-D, a recent provably secure protocol designed to explicitly resist this type of attack. Thus, our result contradicts the design goal. We also give a simple attack on the key indistinguishability of N-EKE-D and two N-EKE-M variants that exploits the definition of partnering in their security model

Group Key Rekeying Technique with Secure Data Encryption in MANETs

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous nodes or mobile devices that can arrange themselves in various ways and operate without strict network administration. Ensuring security in mobile ad hoc network is a challenging issue and most of the applications in mobile ad hoc networks involve group-oriented communication. In Mobile ad-hoc network, each node treated as a terminal and also acts as an intermediate router. In this scenario, multi-hop occurs for communication in mobile ad hoc network. There may be a possibility of threats and malicious nodes in between source and destination. Providing the security in MANET is entirely different from the traditional wired network. In the present scenario, various applications of the mobile ad hoc network have been proposed and issues are solved by using the cryptographic techniques. Mostly cryptographic techniques are used to provide the security to MANETs. Cryptographic techniques will not be efficient security mechanism if the key management is weak. The purpose of key management is to provide secure procedures for handling keys in the cryptographic technique. The responsibilities of key management include key generation, key distribution, and key maintenance. Several key management schemes have been introduced for MANETs. The Group key management scheme is an efficient method for key management in MANET. In group key management scheme, rekeying is used whenever a new node joins or existing node leaves from the group. In this paper, we propose a periodic rekeying method (PRK) and analyze the performance of LKH rekeying techniques in a group key management schemes. The symmetric encryption techniques are analyzed with different parameters, such as Throughput and Energy consumption. Security and performance of rekeying protocols are analyzed through detailed study and simulation

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

Hybrid cryptography key management.

Wireless communication networks are highly resource-constrained; thus many security protocols which work in other settings may not be efficient enough for use in wireless environments. This report considers a variety of cryptographic techniques which enable secure, authenticated communication when resources such as processor speed, battery power, memory, and bandwidth are tightly limited