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

Design and Implementation of S-MARKS: A Secure Middleware for Pervasive Computing Applications

As portable devices have become a part of our everyday life, more people are unknowingly participating in a pervasive computing environment. People engage with not a single device for a specific purpose but many devices interacting with each other in the course of ordinary activity. With such prevalence of pervasive technology, the interaction between portable devices needs to be continuous and imperceptible to device users. Pervasive computing requires a small, scalable and robust network which relies heavily on the middleware to resolve communication and security issues. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of S-MARKS which incorporates device validation, resource discovery and a privacy module

FPGA based remote code integrity verification of programs in distributed embedded systems

The explosive growth of networked embedded systems has made ubiquitous and pervasive computing a reality. However, there are still a number of new challenges to its widespread adoption that include scalability, availability, and, especially, security of software. Among the different challenges in software security, the problem of remote-code integrity verification is still waiting for efficient solutions. This paper proposes the use of reconfigurable computing to build a consistent architecture for generation of attestations (proofs) of code integrity for an executing program as well as to deliver them to the designated verification entity. Remote dynamic update of reconfigurable devices is also exploited to increase the complexity of mounting attacks in a real-word environment. The proposed solution perfectly fits embedded devices that are nowadays commonly equipped with reconfigurable hardware components that are exploited to solve different computational problems

OSCAR: A Collaborative Bandwidth Aggregation System

The exponential increase in mobile data demand, coupled with growing user expectation to be connected in all places at all times, have introduced novel challenges for researchers to address. Fortunately, the wide spread deployment of various network technologies and the increased adoption of multi-interface enabled devices have enabled researchers to develop solutions for those challenges. Such solutions aim to exploit available interfaces on such devices in both solitary and collaborative forms. These solutions, however, have faced a steep deployment barrier. In this paper, we present OSCAR, a multi-objective, incentive-based, collaborative, and deployable bandwidth aggregation system. We present the OSCAR architecture that does not introduce any intermediate hardware nor require changes to current applications or legacy servers. The OSCAR architecture is designed to automatically estimate the system's context, dynamically schedule various connections and/or packets to different interfaces, be backwards compatible with the current Internet architecture, and provide the user with incentives for collaboration. We also formulate the OSCAR scheduler as a multi-objective, multi-modal scheduler that maximizes system throughput while minimizing energy consumption or financial cost. We evaluate OSCAR via implementation on Linux, as well as via simulation, and compare our results to the current optimal achievable throughput, cost, and energy consumption. Our evaluation shows that, in the throughput maximization mode, we provide up to 150% enhancement in throughput compared to current operating systems, without any changes to legacy servers. Moreover, this performance gain further increases with the availability of connection resume-supporting, or OSCAR-enabled servers, reaching the maximum achievable upper-bound throughput

Security architecture for Fog-To-Cloud continuum system

Nowadays, by increasing the number of connected devices to Internet rapidly, cloud computing cannot handle the real-time processing. Therefore, fog computing was emerged for providing data processing, filtering, aggregating, storing, network, and computing closer to the users. Fog computing provides real-time processing with lower latency than cloud. However, fog computing did not come to compete with cloud, it comes to complete the cloud. Therefore, a hierarchical Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) continuum system was introduced. The F2C system brings the collaboration between distributed fogs and centralized cloud. In F2C systems, one of the main challenges is security. Traditional cloud as security provider is not suitable for the F2C system due to be a single-point-of-failure; and even the increasing number of devices at the edge of the network brings scalability issues. Furthermore, traditional cloud security cannot be applied to the fog devices due to their lower computational power than cloud. On the other hand, considering fog nodes as security providers for the edge of the network brings Quality of Service (QoS) issues due to huge fog device’s computational power consumption by security algorithms. There are some security solutions for fog computing but they are not considering the hierarchical fog to cloud characteristics that can cause a no-secure collaboration between fog and cloud. In this thesis, the security considerations, attacks, challenges, requirements, and existing solutions are deeply analyzed and reviewed. And finally, a decoupled security architecture is proposed to provide the demanded security in hierarchical and distributed fashion with less impact on the QoS.Hoy en día, al aumentar rápidamente el número de dispositivos conectados a Internet, el cloud computing no puede gestionar el procesamiento en tiempo real. Por lo tanto, la informática de niebla surgió para proporcionar procesamiento de datos, filtrado, agregación, almacenamiento, red y computación más cercana a los usuarios. La computación nebulizada proporciona procesamiento en tiempo real con menor latencia que la nube. Sin embargo, la informática de niebla no llegó a competir con la nube, sino que viene a completar la nube. Por lo tanto, se introdujo un sistema continuo jerárquico de niebla a nube (F2C). El sistema F2C aporta la colaboración entre las nieblas distribuidas y la nube centralizada. En los sistemas F2C, uno de los principales retos es la seguridad. La nube tradicional como proveedor de seguridad no es adecuada para el sistema F2C debido a que se trata de un único punto de fallo; e incluso el creciente número de dispositivos en el borde de la red trae consigo problemas de escalabilidad. Además, la seguridad tradicional de la nube no se puede aplicar a los dispositivos de niebla debido a su menor poder computacional que la nube. Por otro lado, considerar los nodos de niebla como proveedores de seguridad para el borde de la red trae problemas de Calidad de Servicio (QoS) debido al enorme consumo de energía computacional del dispositivo de niebla por parte de los algoritmos de seguridad. Existen algunas soluciones de seguridad para la informática de niebla, pero no están considerando las características de niebla a nube jerárquica que pueden causar una colaboración insegura entre niebla y nube. En esta tesis, las consideraciones de seguridad, los ataques, los desafíos, los requisitos y las soluciones existentes se analizan y revisan en profundidad. Y finalmente, se propone una arquitectura de seguridad desacoplada para proporcionar la seguridad exigida de forma jerárquica y distribuida con menor impacto en la QoS.Postprint (published version

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Solutions and Tools for Secure Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Secure communication is considered a vital requirement in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. Such a requirement embraces different aspects, including confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of exchanged information, proper management of security material, and effective prevention and reaction against security threats and attacks. However, WSNs are mainly composed of resource-constrained devices. That is, network nodes feature reduced capabilities, especially in terms of memory storage, computing power, transmission rate, and energy availability. As a consequence, assuring secure communication in WSNs results to be more difficult than in other kinds of network. In fact, trading effectiveness of adopted solutions with their efficiency becomes far more important. In addition, specific device classes or technologies may require to design ad hoc security solutions. Also, it is necessary to efficiently manage security material, and dynamically cope with changes of security requirements. Finally, security threats and countermeasures have to be carefully considered since from the network design phase. This Ph.D. dissertion considers secure communication in WSNs, and provides the following contributions. First, we provide a performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 security services. Then, we focus on the ZigBee technology and its security services, and propose possible solutions to some deficiencies and inefficiencies. Second, we present HISS, a highly scalable and efficient key management scheme, able to contrast collusion attacks while displaying a graceful degradation of performance. Third, we present STaR, a software component for WSNs that secures multiple traffic flows at the same time. It is transparent to the application, and provides runtime reconfigurability, thus coping with dynamic changes of security requirements. Finally, we describe ASF, our attack simulation framework for WSNs. Such a tool helps network designers to quantitatively evaluate effects of security attacks, produce an attack ranking based on their severity, and thus select the most appropriate countermeasures

Secure Mobile Social Networks using USIM in a Closed Environment

Online social networking and corresponding mobile based applications are gaining popularity and now considered a well-integrated service within mobile devices. Basic security mechanisms normally based on passwords for the authentication of social-network users are widely deployed and poses a threat for the user security. In particular, for dedicated social groups with high confidentiality and privacy demands, stronger and user friendly principles for the authentication and identification of group members are needed. On the other hand, most of the mobile units already provide strong authentication procedures through the USIM/ISIM module. This paper explores how to build an architectural framework for secure enrollment and identification of group members in dedicated closed social groups using the USIM/SIM authentication and in particular, the 3GPP Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA), which is built upon the USIM/SIM capabilities. One part of the research is to identify the marketable use-cases with corresponding security challenges to fulfill the requirements that extend beyond the online connectivity. This paper proposes a secure identification design to satisfy the security dimensions for both online and offline peers. We have also implemented an initial proof of the concept prototype to simulate the secure identification procedure based on the proposed design. Our implementation has demonstrated the flexibility of the solution to be applied independently for applications requiring secure identification