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

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocols for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation wireless networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to service providers. As WMNs become an increasingly popular replacement technology for last-mile connectivity to the home networking, community and neighborhood networking, it is imperative to design efficient and secure communication protocols for these networks. However, several vulnerabilities exist in currently existing protocols for WMNs. These security loopholes can be exploited by potential attackers to launch attack on WMNs. The absence of a central point of administration makes securing WMNs even more challenging. The broadcast nature of transmission and the dependency on the intermediate nodes for multi-hop communications lead to several security vulnerabilities in WMNs. The attacks can be external as well as internal in nature. External attacks are launched by intruders who are not authorized users of the network. For example, an intruding node may eavesdrop on the packets and replay those packets at a later point of time to gain access to the network resources. On the other hand, the internal attacks are launched by the nodes that are part of the WMN. On example of such attack is an intermediate node dropping packets which it was supposed to forward. This chapter presents a comprehensive discussion on the current authentication and privacy protection schemes for WMN. In addition, it proposes a novel security protocol for node authentication and message confidentiality and an anonymization scheme for privacy protection of users in WMNs.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures. The work is an extended version of the author's previous works submitted in CoRR: arXiv:1107.5538v1 and arXiv:1102.1226v

Non-repudiable authentication and billing architecture for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are a kind of wireless ad hoc networks that are multi-hop where packets are forwarded from source to destination by intermediate notes as well as routers that form a kind of network infrastructure backbone. We investigate the security of the recently proposed first known secure authentication and billing architecture for WMNs which eliminates the need for bilateral roaming agreements and that for traditional home-foreign domains. We show that this architecture does not securely provide incontestable billing contrary to designer claims and furthermore it does not achieve entity authentication. We then present an enhanced scheme that achieves entity authentication and nonrepudiable billing

Reliable and Secure Drone-assisted MillimeterWave Communications

The next generation of mobile networks and wireless communication, including the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond, will provide a high data rate as one of its fundamental requirements. Providing high data rates can be accomplished through communication over high-frequency bands such as the Millimeter-Wave(mmWave) one. However, mmWave communication experiences short-range communication, which impacts the overall network connectivity. Improving network connectivity can be accomplished through deploying Unmanned Ariel Vehicles(UAVs), commonly known as drones, which serve as aerial small-cell base stations. Moreover, drone deployment is of special interest in recovering network connectivity in the aftermath of disasters. Despite the potential advantages, drone-assisted networks can be more vulnerable to security attacks, given their limited capabilities. This security vulnerability is especially true in the aftermath of a disaster where security measures could be at their lowest. This thesis focuses on drone-assisted mmWave communication networks with their potential to provide reliable communication in terms of higher network connectivity measures, higher total network data rate, and lower end-to-end delay. Equally important, this thesis focuses on proposing and developing security measures needed for drone-assisted networks’ secure operation. More specifically, we aim to employ a swarm of drones to have more connection, reliability, and secure communication over the mmWave band. Finally, we target both the cellular 5Gnetwork and Ad hoc IEEE802.11ad/ay in typical network deployments as well as in post-disaster circumstances

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Vehicular Communications

Road safety has been drawing increasing attention in the public, and has been subject to extensive efforts from both industry and academia in mitigating the impact of traffic accidents. Recent advances in wireless technology promise new approaches to facilitating road safety and traffic management, where each vehicle (or referred to as On-board unit (OBU)) is allowed to communicate with each other as well as with Roadside units (RSUs), which are located in some critical sections of the road, such as a traffic light, an intersection, and a stop sign. With the OBUs and RSUs, a self-organized network, called Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET), can thus be formed. Unfortunately, VANETs have faced various security threats and privacy concerns, which would jeopardize the public safety and become the main barrier to the acceptance of such a new technology. Hence, addressing security and privacy issues is a prerequisite for a market-ready VANET. Although many studies have recently addressed a significant amount of efforts in solving the related problems, few of the studies has taken the scalability issues into consideration. When the traffic density is getting large, a vehicle may become unable to verify the authenticity of the messages sent by its neighbors in a timely manner, which may result in message loss so that public safety may be at risk. Communication overhead is another issue that has not been well addressed in previously reported studies. Many efforts have been made in recent years in achieving efficient broadcast source authentication and data integrity by using fast symmetric cryptography. However, the dynamic nature of VANETs makes it very challenging in the applicability of these symmetric cryptography-based protocols. In this research, we propose a novel Secure and Efficient RSU-aided Privacy Preservation Protocol, called SERP^3, in order to achieve efficient secure and privacy-preserving Inter-Vehicle Communications (IVCs). With the commitments of one-way key chains distributed to vehicles by RSUs, a vehicle can effectively authenticate any received message from vehicles nearby even in the presence of frequent change of its neighborship. Compared with previously reported public key infrastructure (PKI)-based packet authentication protocols for security and privacy, the proposed protocol not only retains the security and privacy preservation properties, but also has less packet loss ratio and lower communication overhead, especially when the road traffic is heavy. Therefore, the protocol solves the scalability and communication overhead issues, while maintaining acceptable packet latency. However, RSU may not exist in some situations, for example, in the early stage deployment phase of VANET, where unfortunately, SERP^3 is not suitable. Thus, we propose a complementary Efficient and Cooperative Message Validation Protocol, called ECMVP, where each vehicle probabilistically validates a certain percentage of its received messages based on its own computing capacity and then reports any invalid messages detected by it. Since the ultimate goal of designing VANET is to develop vehicle safety/non-safety related applications to improve road safety and facilitate traffic management, two vehicle applications are further proposed in the research to exploit the advantages of vehicular communications. First, a novel vehicle safety application for achieving a secure road traffic control system in VANETs is developed. The proposed application helps circumvent vehicles safely and securely through the areas in any abnormal situation, such as a car crash scene, while ensuring the security and privacy of the drivers from various threats. It not only enhances traveler safety but also minimizes capacity restrictions due to any unusual situation. Second, the dissertation investigates a novel mobile payment system for highway toll collection by way of vehicular communications, which addresses all the issues in the currently existing toll collection technologies