Opportunistic Key Management in Delay Tolerant Networks

Key Management is considered to be a challenging task in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) operating in environments with adverse communication conditions such as space, due to the practical limitations and constraints prohibiting effective closed loop communications. In this paper we propose opportunistic key management as a more suitable solution for key management in networks requiring opportunistic behaviour. We show that opportunistic key management is better exploited and utilized when used in conjunction with routing decisions by security aware DTN nodes

A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

BVPSMS: A Batch Verification Protocol for End-to-End Secure SMS for Mobile Users

Short Message Service (SMS) is a widely used communication medium for mobile applications, such as banking, social networking, and e-commerce. Applications of SMS services also include real-time broadcasting messages, such as notification of natural disasters and terrorist attacks, and sharing the current whereabouts to other users, such as notifying urgent business meeting information, transmitting quick information in the battlefield to multiple users, notifying current location to our friends, and sharing market information. However, traditional SMS is not designed with security in mind (e.g. messages are not securely sent). In this paper, we introduce a batch verification Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol, BVPSMS, which provides end-to-end message security over an insecure communication channel between different Mobile Subscribers (MSs). Specifically, the proposed protocol securely transmits SMS from one MS to multiple MS simultaneously. We then evaluate the performance of the BVPSMS protocol in terms of communication and computation overheads, protocol execution time, and batch and re-batch verification times. The impacts of the user mobility, and the time, space, and cost complexity analysis are also discussed. We present a formal proof of the proposed protocol. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first provably-secure batch verification AKA protocol, which provides end-to-end security to the SMS using symmetric keys

A Multi-User, Single-Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Architectures

open access articleIn a smart grid system, the utility server collects data from various smart grid devices. These data play an important role in the energy distribution and balancing between the energy providers and energy consumers. However, these data are prone to tampering attacks by an attacker, while traversing from the smart grid devices to the utility servers, which may result in energy disruption or imbalance. Thus, an authentication is mandatory to efficiently authenticate the devices and the utility servers and avoid tampering attacks. To this end, a group authentication algorithm is proposed for preserving demand–response security in a smart grid. The proposed mechanism also provides a fine-grained access control feature where the utility server can only access a limited number of smart grid devices. The initial authentication between the utility server and smart grid device in a group involves a single public key operation, while the subsequent authentications with the same device or other devices in the same group do not need a public key operation. This reduces the overall computation and communication overheads and takes less time to successfully establish a secret session key, which is used to exchange sensitive information over an unsecured wireless channel. The resilience of the proposed algorithm is tested against various attacks using formal and informal security analysis