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

Intrusion Detection for Smart Grid Communication Systems

Transformation of the traditional power grid into a smart grid hosts an array of vulnerabilities associated with communication networks. Furthermore, wireless mediums used throughout the smart grid promote an environment where Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are very effective. In wireless mediums, jamming and spoofing attack techniques diminish system operations thus affecting smart grid stability and posing an immediate threat to Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) of the smart grid. Intrusion detection systems (IDS) serve as a primary defense in mitigating network vulnerabilities. In IDS, signatures created from historical data are compared to incoming network traffic to identify abnormalities. In this thesis, intrusion detection algorithms are proposed for attack detection in smart grid networks by means of physical, data link, network, and session layer analysis. Irregularities in these layers provide insight to whether the network is experiencing genuine or malicious activity

Exploring Wireless Data Center Networks: Can They Reduce Energy Consumption While Providing Secure Connections?

Data centers have become the digital backbone of the modern world. To support the growing demands on bandwidth, Data Centers consume an increasing amount of power. A significant portion of that power is consumed by information technology (IT) equipment, including servers and networking components. Additionally, the complex cabling in traditional data centers poses design and maintenance challenges and increases the energy cost of the cooling infrastructure by obstructing the flow of chilled air. Hence, to reduce the power consumption of the data centers, we proposed a wireless server-to-server data center network architecture using millimeter-wave links to eliminate the need for power-hungry switching fabric of traditional fat-tree-based data center networks. The server-to-server wireless data center network (S2S-WiDCN) architecture requires Line-of-Sight (LoS) between servers to establish direct communication links. However, in the presence of interference from internal or external sources, or an obstruction, such as an IT technician, the LoS may be blocked. To address this issue, we also propose a novel obstruction-aware adaptive routing algorithm for S2S-WiDCN. S2S-WiDCN can reduce the power consumption of the data center network portion while not affecting the power consumption of the servers in the data center, which contributes significantly towards the total power consumption of the data center. Moreover, servers in data centers are almost always underutilized due to over-provisioning, which contributes heavily toward the high-power consumption of the data centers. To address the high power consumption of the servers, we proposed a network-aware bandwidth-constrained server consolidation algorithm called Network-Aware Server Consolidation (NASCon) for wireless data centers that can reduce the power consumption up to 37% while improving the network performance. However, due to the arrival of new tasks and the completion of existing tasks, the consolidated utilization profile of servers change, which may have an adverse effect on overall power consumption over time. To overcome this, NASCon algorithm needs to be executed periodically. We have proposed a mathematical model to estimate the optimal inter-consolidation time, which can be used by the data center resource management unit for scheduling NASCon consolidation operation in real-time and leverage the benefits of server consolidation. However, in any data center environment ensuring security is one of the highest design priorities. Hence, for S2S-WiDCN to become a practical and viable solution for data center network design, the security of the network has to be ensured. S2S-WiDCN data center can be vulnerable to a variety of different attacks as it uses wireless links over an unguided channel for communication. As being a wireless system, the network has to be secured against common threats associated with any wireless networks such as eavesdropping attack, denial of services attack, and jamming attack. In parallel, other security threats such as the attack on the control plane, side-channel attack through traffic analysis are also possible. We have done an extensive study to elaborate the scope of these attacks as well as explore probable solutions against these issues. We also proposed viable solutions for the attack against eavesdropping, denial of services, jamming, and control-plane attack. To address the traffic analysis attack, we proposed a simulated annealing-based random routing mechanism which can be adopted instead of default routing in the wireless data center