Synoptic analysis techniques for intrusion detection in wireless networks

Current system administrators are missing intrusion alerts hidden by large numbers of false positives. Rather than accumulation more data to identify true alerts, we propose an intrusion detection tool that e?ectively uses select data to provide a picture of ?network health?. Our hypothesis is that by utilizing the data available at both the node and cooperative network levels we can create a synoptic picture of the network providing indications of many intrusions or other network issues. Our major contribution is to provide a revolutionary way to analyze node and network data for patterns, dependence, and e?ects that indicate network issues. We collect node and network data, combine and manipulate it, and tease out information about the state of the network. We present a method based on utilizing the number of packets sent, number of packets received, node reliability, route reliability, and entropy to develop a synoptic picture of the network health in the presence of a sinkhole and a HELLO Flood attacker. This method conserves network throughput and node energy by requiring no additional control messages to be sent between the nodes unless an attacker is suspected. We intend to show that, although the concept of an intrusion detection system is not revolutionary, the method in which we analyze the data for clues about network intrusion and performance is highly innovative

Cyber-Physical Security Strategies

Cyber-physical security describes the protection of systems with close relationships between computational functions and physical ones and addresses the issue of vulnerability to attack through both cyber and physical avenues. This describes systems in a wide variety of functions, many crucial to the function of modern society, making their security of paramount importance. The development of secure system design and attack detection strategies for each potential avenue of attack is needed to combat malicious attacks. This thesis will provide an overview of the approaches to securing different aspect of cyber-physical systems. The cyber element can be designed to better prevent unauthorized entry and to be more robust to attack while its use is evaluated for signs of ongoing intrusion. Nodes in sensor networks can be evaluated by their claims to determine the likelihood of their honesty. Control systems can be designed to be robust in cases of the failure of one component and to detect signal insertion or replay attack. Through the application of these strategies, the safety and continued function of cyber-physical systems can be improved

A Survey on the Communication Protocols and Security in Cognitive Radio Networks

A cognitive radio (CR) is a radio that can change its transmission parameters based on the perceived availability of the spectrum bands in its operating environment. CRs support dynamic spectrum access and can facilitate a secondary unlicensed user to efficiently utilize the available underutilized spectrum allocated to the primary licensed users. A cognitive radio network (CRN) is composed of both the secondary users with CR-enabled radios and the primary users whose radios need not be CR-enabled. Most of the active research conducted in the area of CRNs has been so far focused on spectrum sensing, allocation and sharing. There is no comprehensive review paper available on the strategies for medium access control (MAC), routing and transport layer protocols, and the appropriate representative solutions for CRNs. In this paper, we provide an exhaustive analysis of the various techniques/mechanisms that have been proposed in the literature for communication protocols (at the MAC, routing and transport layers), in the context of a CRN, as well as discuss in detail several security attacks that could be launched on CRNs and the countermeasure solutions that have been proposed to avoid or mitigate them. This paper would serve as a good comprehensive review and analysis of the strategies for MAC, routing and transport protocols and security issues for CRNs as well as would lay a strong foundation for someone to further delve onto any particular aspect in greater depth

On security and privacy of consensus-based protocols in blockchain and smart grid

In recent times, distributed consensus protocols have received widespread attention in the area of blockchain and smart grid. Consensus algorithms aim to solve an agreement problem among a set of nodes in a distributed environment. Participants in a blockchain use consensus algorithms to agree on data blocks containing an ordered set of transactions. Similarly, agents in the smart grid employ consensus to agree on specific values (e.g., energy output, market-clearing price, control parameters) in distributed energy management protocols. This thesis focuses on the security and privacy aspects of a few popular consensus-based protocols in blockchain and smart grid. In the blockchain area, we analyze the consensus protocol of one of the most popular payment systems: Ripple. We show how the parameters chosen by the Ripple designers do not prevent the occurrence of forks in the system. Furthermore, we provide the conditions to prevent any fork in the Ripple network. In the smart grid area, we discuss the privacy issues in the Economic Dispatch (ED) optimization problem and some of its recent solutions using distributed consensus-based approaches. We analyze two state of the art consensus-based ED protocols from Yang et al. (2013) and Binetti et al. (2014). We show how these protocols leak private information about the participants. We propose privacy-preserving versions of these consensus-based ED protocols. In some cases, we also improve upon the communication cost