Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs

SECURITY AND PRIVACY ISSUES IN MOBILE NETWORKS, DIFFICULTIES AND SOLUTIONS

Mobile communication is playing a vital role in the daily life for the last two decades; in turn its fields gained the research attention, which led to the introduction of new technologies, services and applications. These new added facilities aimed to ease the connectivity and reachability; on the other hand, many security and privacy concerns were not taken into consideration. This opened the door for the malicious activities to threaten the deployed systems and caused vulnerabilities for users, translated in the loss of valuable data and major privacy invasions. Recently, many attempts have been carried out to handle these concerns, such as improving systems’ security and implementing different privacy enhancing mechanisms. This research addresses these problems and provides a mean to preserve privacy in particular. In this research, a detailed description and analysis of the current security and privacy situation in the deployed systems is given. As a result, the existing shortages within these systems are pointed out, to be mitigated in development. Finally a privacy preserving prototype model is proposed. This research has been conducted as an extensive literature review about the most relevant references and researches in the field, using the descriptive and evaluative research methodologies. The main security models, parameters, modules and protocols are presented, also a detailed description of privacy and its related arguments, dimensions and factors is given. The findings include that mobile networks’ security along with users are vulnerable due to the weaknesses of the key exchange procedures, the difficulties that face possession, repudiation, standardization, compatibility drawbacks and lack of configurability. It also includes the need to implement new mechanisms to protect security and preserve privacy, which include public key cryptography, HIP servers, IPSec, TLS, NAT and DTLS-SRTP. Last but not least, it shows that privacy is not absolute and it has many conflicts, also privacy requires sophisticated systems, which increase the load and cost of the system.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Bootstrapping Real-world Deployment of Future Internet Architectures

The past decade has seen many proposals for future Internet architectures. Most of these proposals require substantial changes to the current networking infrastructure and end-user devices, resulting in a failure to move from theory to real-world deployment. This paper describes one possible strategy for bootstrapping the initial deployment of future Internet architectures by focusing on providing high availability as an incentive for early adopters. Through large-scale simulation and real-world implementation, we show that with only a small number of adopting ISPs, customers can obtain high availability guarantees. We discuss design, implementation, and evaluation of an availability device that allows customers to bridge into the future Internet architecture without modifications to their existing infrastructure

Securing the Internet at the Exchange Points

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Arquitectura, Sistemas e Redes de Computadores), 2022, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasBGP, the border gateway protocol, is the inter-domain routing protocol that glues the Internet. Despite its importance, it has well-known security problems. Frequently, the BGP infrastructure is the target of prefix hijacking and path manipulation attacks. These attacks disrupt the normal functioning of the Internet by either redirecting the traffic, potentially allowing eavesdropping, or even preventing it from reaching its destination altogether, affecting availability. These problems result from the lack of a fundamental security mechanism: the ability to validate the information in routing announcements. Specifically, it does not authenticate the prefix origin nor the validity of the announced routes. This means that an intermediate network that intercepts a BGP announcement can maliciously announce an IP prefix that it does not own as theirs, or insert a bogus path to a prefix with the goal to intercept traffic. Several solutions have been proposed in the past, but they all have limitations, of which the most severe is arguably the requirement to perform drastic changes on the existing BGP infrastructure (i.e., requiring the replacement of existing equipment). In addition, most solutions require their widespread adoption to be effective. Finally, they typically require secure communication channels between the participant routers, which entails computationally-intensive cryptographic verification capabilities that are normally unavailable in this type of equipment. With these challenges in mind, this thesis proposes to investigate the possibility to improve BGP security by leveraging the software-defined networking (SDN) technology that is increasingly common at Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). These interconnection facilities are single locations that typically connect hundreds to thousands of networks, working as Internet “middlemen” ideally placed to implement inter-network mechanisms, such as security, without requiring changes to the network operators’ infrastructure. Our key idea is to include a secure channel between IXPs that, by running in the SDN server that controls these modern infrastructures, avoids the cryptographic requirements in the routers. In our solution, the secure channel for communication implements a distributed ledger (a blockchain), for decentralized trust and its other inherent guarantees. The rationale is that by increasing trust and avoiding expensive infrastructure updates, we hope to create incentives for operators to adhere to these new IXP-enhanced security services

An analysis of the risk exposure of adopting IPV6 in enterprise networks

The IPv6 increased address pool presents changes in resource impact to the Enterprise that, if not adequately addressed, can change risks that are locally significant in IPv4 to risks that can impact the Enterprise in its entirety. The expected conclusion is that the IPv6 environment will impose significant changes in the Enterprise environment - which may negatively impact organisational security if the IPv6 nuances are not adequately addressed. This thesis reviews the risks related to the operation of enterprise networks with the introduction of IPv6. The global trends are discussed to provide insight and background to the IPv6 research space. Analysing the current state of readiness in enterprise networks, quantifies the value of developing this thesis. The base controls that should be deployed in enterprise networks to prevent the abuse of IPv6 through tunnelling and the protection of the enterprise access layer are discussed. A series of case studies are presented which identify and analyse the impact of certain changes in the IPv6 protocol on the enterprise networks. The case studies also identify mitigation techniques to reduce risk

Chuchotage: In-line Software Network Protocol Translation for (D)TLS

The growing diversity of connected devices leads to complex network deployments, often made up of endpoints that implement in- compatible network application protocols. Communication between heterogeneous network protocols was traditionally enabled by hardware translators or gateways. However, such solutions are increasingly unfit to address the security, scalability, and latency requirements of modern software-driven deployments. To address these shortcomings we propose Chuchotage, a protocol translation architecture for secure and scalable machine-to-machine communication. Chuchotage enables in-line TLS interception and confidential protocol translation for software-defined networks. Translation is done in ephemeral, flow-specific Trusted Execution Environments and scales with the number of network flows. Our evaluation of Chuchotage implementing an HTTP to CoAP translation indicates a minimal transmission and translation overhead, allowing its integration with legacy or outdated deployments