A personal networking solution

This paper presents an overview of research being conducted on Personal Networking Solutions within the Mobile VCE Personal Distributed Environment Work Area. In particular it attempts to highlight areas of commonality with the MAGNET initiative. These areas include trust of foreign devices and service providers, dynamic real-time service negotiation to permit context-aware service delivery, an automated controller algorithm for wireless ad hoc networks, and routing protocols for ad hoc networking environments. Where possible references are provided to Mobile VCE publications to enable further reading

Security in Pervasive Computing: Current Status and Open Issues

Million of wireless device users are ever on the move, becoming more dependent on their PDAs, smart phones, and other handheld devices. With the advancement of pervasive computing, new and unique capabilities are available to aid mobile societies. The wireless nature of these devices has fostered a new era of mobility. Thousands of pervasive devices are able to arbitrarily join and leave a network, creating a nomadic environment known as a pervasive ad hoc network. However, mobile devices have vulnerabilities, and some are proving to be challenging. Security in pervasive computing is the most critical challenge. Security is needed to ensure exact and accurate confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and access control, to name a few. Security for mobile devices, though still in its infancy, has drawn the attention of various researchers. As pervasive devices become incorporated in our day-to-day lives, security will increasingly becoming a common concern for all users - - though for most it will be an afterthought, like many other computing functions. The usability and expansion of pervasive computing applications depends greatly on the security and reliability provided by the applications. At this critical juncture, security research is growing. This paper examines the recent trends and forward thinking investigation in several fields of security, along with a brief history of previous accomplishments in the corresponding areas. Some open issues have been discussed for further investigation

A two‐step authentication framework for Mobile ad hoc networks

The lack of fixed infrastructure in ad hoc networks causes nodes to rely more heavily on peer nodes for communication. Nevertheless, establishing trust in such a distributed environment is very difficult, since it is not straightforward for a node to determine if its peer nodes can be trusted. An additional concern in such an environment is with whether a peer node is merely relaying a message or if it is the originator of the message. In this paper, we propose an authentication approach for protecting nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. The security requirements for protecting data link and network layers are identified and the design criteria for creating secure ad hoc networks using several authentication protocols are analyzed. Protocols based on zero knowledge and challenge response techniques are presented and their performance is evaluated through analysis and simulation

A Fair and Secure Cluster Formation Process for Ad Hoc Networks

An efficient approach for organizing large ad hoc networks is to divide the nodes into multiple clusters and designate, for each cluster, a clusterhead which is responsible for holding intercluster control information. The role of a clusterhead entails rights and duties. On the one hand, it has a dominant position in front of the others because it manages the connectivity and has access to other node¿s sensitive information. But on the other hand, the clusterhead role also has some associated costs. Hence, in order to prevent malicious nodes from taking control of the group in a fraudulent way and avoid selfish attacks from suitable nodes, the clusterhead needs to be elected in a secure way. In this paper we present a novel solution that guarantees the clusterhead is elected in a cheat-proof manner

MiPOS - the Mote Indoor Positioning System

In the past few years, there have been huge research efforts into ubiquitous and context aware platforms that offer a user a custom level of service based on some known local parameters. The utility of such systems is greatly enhanced if a physical locational area can be determined. Recently, hybrid devices have been developed combining low power micro controllers with short range FM radio transceivers. Some location identification work has been carried out with these systems such as the Matrix Pencil approximation technique[8],however most of these all provide information for an ideal square area with no RF obstructions.Here we present MiPOS, a scalable locationing system based on the MICA mote[11] family of devices.The design goal of MiPOS is to provide a low-power, scalable, distributed locationing system suited to an indoor (office) environment.During the presentation of this paper we will highlight solutions in the areas of security, radio and network management and power awareness for a hybrid context aware wearable locationing device

Architecture for Mobile Heterogeneous Multi Domain Networks

Multi domain networks can be used in several scenarios including military, enterprize networks, emergency networks and many other cases. In such networks, each domain might be under its own administration. Therefore, the cooperation among domains is conditioned by individual domain policies regarding sharing information, such as network topology, connectivity, mobility, security, various service availability and so on. We propose a new architecture for Heterogeneous Multi Domain (HMD) networks, in which one the operations are subject to specific domain policies. We propose a hierarchical architecture, with an infrastructure of gateways at highest-control level that enables policy based interconnection, mobility and other services among domains. Gateways are responsible for translation among different communication protocols, including routing, signalling, and security. Besides the architecture, we discuss in more details the mobility and adaptive capacity of services in HMD. We discuss the HMD scalability and other advantages compared to existing architectural and mobility solutions. Furthermore, we analyze the dynamic availability at the control level of the hierarchy

Trust-based security for the OLSR routing protocol

International audienceThe trust is always present implicitly in the protocols based on cooperation, in particular, between the entities involved in routing operations in Ad hoc networks. Indeed, as the wireless range of such nodes is limited, the nodes mutually cooperate with their neighbors in order to extend the remote nodes and the entire network. In our work, we are interested by trust as security solution for OLSR protocol. This approach fits particularly with characteristics of ad hoc networks. Moreover, the explicit trust management allows entities to reason with and about trust, and to take decisions regarding other entities. In this paper, we detail the techniques and the contributions in trust-based security in OLSR. We present trust-based analysis of the OLSR protocol using trust specification language, and we show how trust-based reasoning can allow each node to evaluate the behavior of the other nodes. After the detection of misbehaving nodes, we propose solutions of prevention and countermeasures to resolve the situations of inconsistency, and counter the malicious nodes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution taking different simulated attacks scenarios. Our approach brings few modifications and is still compatible with the bare OLSR

Spectrum Trading: An Abstracted Bibliography

This document contains a bibliographic list of major papers on spectrum trading and their abstracts. The aim of the list is to offer researchers entering this field a fast panorama of the current literature. The list is continually updated on the webpage \url{http://www.disp.uniroma2.it/users/naldi/Ricspt.html}. Omissions and papers suggested for inclusion may be pointed out to the authors through e-mail (\textit{[email protected]})

A robust self-organized public key management for mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-organized wireless network where mobile nodes can communicate with each other without the use of any existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Trust establishment and management are essential for any security framework of MANETs. However, traditional solutions to key management through accessing trusted authorities or centralized servers are infeasible for MANETs due to the absence of infrastructure, frequent mobility, and wireless link instability. In this paper, we propose a robust self-organized, public key management for MANETs. The proposed scheme relies on establishing a small number of trust relations between neighboring nodes during the network initialization phase. Experiences gained as a result of successful communications and node mobility through the network enhance the formation of a web of trust between mobile nodes. The proposed scheme allows each user to create its public key and the corresponding private key, to issue certificates to neighboring nodes, and to perform public key authentication through at least two independent certificate chains without relying on any centralized authority. A measure of the communications cost of the key distribution process has been proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is robust and efficient in the mobility environment of MANET and against malicious node attacks