1,200 research outputs found
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
A Review of the Energy Efficient and Secure Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks
This paper presents a thorough survey of recent work addressing energy
efficient multicast routing protocols and secure multicast routing protocols in
Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). There are so many issues and solutions which
witness the need of energy management and security in ad hoc wireless networks.
The objective of a multicast routing protocol for MANETs is to support the
propagation of data from a sender to all the receivers of a multicast group
while trying to use the available bandwidth efficiently in the presence of
frequent topology changes. Multicasting can improve the efficiency of the
wireless link when sending multiple copies of messages by exploiting the
inherent broadcast property of wireless transmission. Secure multicast routing
plays a significant role in MANETs. However, offering energy efficient and
secure multicast routing is a difficult and challenging task. In recent years,
various multicast routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. These
protocols have distinguishing features and use different mechanismsComment: 15 page
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
Secure Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the
challenges in next-generation networks such as providing flexible, adaptive,
and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to the
service providers. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, with each access point
(AP) connected to the wired network, in WMNs only a subset of the APs are
required to be connected to the wired network. The APs that are connected to
the wired network are called the Internet gateways (IGWs), while the APs that
do not have wired connections are called the mesh routers (MRs). The MRs are
connected to the IGWs using multi-hop communication. The IGWs provide access to
conventional clients and interconnect ad hoc, sensor, cellular, and other
networks to the Internet. However, most of the existing routing protocols for
WMNs are extensions of protocols originally designed for mobile ad hoc networks
(MANETs) and thus they perform sub-optimally. Moreover, most routing protocols
for WMNs are designed without security issues in mind, where the nodes are all
assumed to be honest. In practical deployment scenarios, this assumption does
not hold. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in
WMNs and then particularly focuses on secure routing in these networks. First,
it identifies security vulnerabilities in the medium access control (MAC) and
the network layers. Various possibilities of compromising data confidentiality,
data integrity, replay attacks and offline cryptanalysis are also discussed.
Then various types of attacks in the MAC and the network layers are discussed.
After enumerating the various types of attacks on the MAC and the network
layer, the chapter briefly discusses on some of the preventive mechanisms for
these attacks.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures, 5 table
Efficient Security Protocols for Fast Handovers in Wireless Mesh Networks
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are gaining popularity as a flexible and inexpensive replacement for Ethernet-based infrastructures. As the use of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets is becoming ubiquitous, mobile clients should be guaranteed uninterrupted connectivity and services as they move from one access point to another within a WMN or between networks. To that end, we propose a novel security framework that consists of a new architecture, trust models, and protocols to offer mobile clients seamless and fast handovers in WMNs. The framework provides a dynamic, flexible, resource-efficient, and secure platform for intra-network and inter-network handovers in order to support real-time mobile applications in WMNs. In particular, we propose solutions to the following problems: authentication, key management, and group key management. We propose
(1) a suite of certificate-based authentication protocols that minimize the authentication delay during handovers from one access point to another within a network (intra-network authentication).
(2) a suite of key distribution and authentication protocols that minimize the authentication delay during handovers from one network to another (inter-network authentication).
(3) a new implementation of group key management at the data link layer in order to
reduce the group key update latency from linear time (as currently done in IEEE 802.11 standards) to logarithmic time. This contributes towards minimizing the latency of the handover process for mobile members in a multicast or broadcast group
Routing Security Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks: Attacks and Defenses
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are rapidly emerging as an important new area
in wireless and mobile computing research. Applications of WSNs are numerous
and growing, and range from indoor deployment scenarios in the home and office
to outdoor deployment scenarios in adversary's territory in a tactical
battleground (Akyildiz et al., 2002). For military environment, dispersal of
WSNs into an adversary's territory enables the detection and tracking of enemy
soldiers and vehicles. For home/office environments, indoor sensor networks
offer the ability to monitor the health of the elderly and to detect intruders
via a wireless home security system. In each of these scenarios, lives and
livelihoods may depend on the timeliness and correctness of the sensor data
obtained from dispersed sensor nodes. As a result, such WSNs must be secured to
prevent an intruder from obstructing the delivery of correct sensor data and
from forging sensor data. To address the latter problem, end-to-end data
integrity checksums and post-processing of senor data can be used to identify
forged sensor data (Estrin et al., 1999; Hu et al., 2003a; Ye et al., 2004).
The focus of this chapter is on routing security in WSNs. Most of the currently
existing routing protocols for WSNs make an optimization on the limited
capabilities of the nodes and the application-specific nature of the network,
but do not any the security aspects of the protocols. Although these protocols
have not been designed with security as a goal, it is extremely important to
analyze their security properties. When the defender has the liabilities of
insecure wireless communication, limited node capabilities, and possible
insider threats, and the adversaries can use powerful laptops with high energy
and long range communication to attack the network, designing a secure routing
protocol for WSNs is obviously a non-trivial task.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables 4. arXiv admin note: substantial text
overlap with arXiv:1011.152
End-to-end security in active networks
Active network solutions have been proposed to many of the problems caused by the increasing heterogeneity of the Internet. These ystems allow nodes within the network to process data passing through in several ways. Allowing code from various sources to run on routers introduces numerous security concerns that have been addressed by research into safe languages, restricted execution environments, and other related areas. But little attention has been paid to an even more critical question: the effect on end-to-end security of active flow manipulation. This thesis first examines the threat model implicit in active networks. It develops a framework of security protocols in use at various layers of the networking stack, and their utility to multimedia transport and flow processing, and asks if it is reasonable to give active routers access to the plaintext of these flows. After considering the various security problem introduced, such as vulnerability to attacks on intermediaries or coercion, it concludes not. We then ask if active network systems can be built that maintain end-to-end security without seriously degrading the functionality they provide. We describe the design and analysis of three such protocols: a distributed packet filtering system that can be used to adjust multimedia bandwidth requirements and defend against denial-of-service attacks; an efficient composition of link and transport-layer reliability mechanisms that increases the performance of TCP over lossy wireless links; and a distributed watermarking servicethat can efficiently deliver media flows marked with the identity of their recipients. In all three cases, similar functionality is provided to designs that do not maintain end-to-end security. Finally, we reconsider traditional end-to-end arguments in both networking and security, and show that they have continuing importance for Internet design. Our watermarking work adds the concept of splitting trust throughout a network to that model; we suggest further applications of this idea
Multi-Service Group Key Management for High Speed Wireless Mobile Multicast Networks
YesRecently there is a high demand from the Internet Service Providers to transmit multimedia services over high speed wireless networks. These networks are characterized by high mobility receivers which perform frequent handoffs across homogenous and heterogeneous access networks while maintaining seamless connectivity to the multimedia services. In order to ensure secure delivery of multimedia services to legitimate group members, the conventional cluster based group key management (GKM) schemes for securing group communication over wireless mobile multicast networks have been proposed. However, they lack efficiency in rekeying the group key in the presence of high mobility users which concurrently subscribe to multiple multicast services that co-exist in the same network. This paper proposes an efficient multi-service group key management scheme (SMGKM) suitable for high mobility users which perform frequent handoffs while participating seamlessly in multiple multicast services. The users are expected to drop subscriptions after multiple cluster visits hence inducing huge key management overhead due to rekeying the previously visited cluster keys. The already proposed multi-service SMGKM system with completely decentralised authentication and key management functions is adopted to meet the demands for high mobility environment with the same level of security. Through comparisons with existing GKM schemes and simulations, SMGKM shows resource economy in terms of reduced communication and less storage overheads in a high speed environment with multiple visits
Adaptive trust and reputation system as a security service in group communications
Group communications has been facilitating many emerging applications which require packet delivery from one or more sender(s) to multiple receivers. Owing to the multicasting and broadcasting nature, group communications are susceptible to various kinds of attacks. Though a number of proposals have been reported to secure group communications, provisioning security in group communications remains a critical and challenging issue.
This work first presents a survey on recent advances in security requirements and services in group communications in wireless and wired networks, and discusses challenges in designing secure group communications in these networks. Effective security services to secure group communications are then proposed. This dissertation also introduces the taxonomy of security services, which can be applied to secure group communications, and evaluates existing secure group communications schemes.
This dissertation work analyzes a number of vulnerabilities against trust and reputation systems, and proposes a threat model to predict attack behaviors. This work also considers scenarios in which multiple attacking agents actively and collaboratively attack the whole network as well as a specific individual node. The behaviors may be related to both performance issues and security issues. Finally, this work extensively examines and substantiates the security of the proposed trust and reputation system.
This work next discusses the proposed trust and reputation system for an anonymous network, referred to as the Adaptive Trust-based Anonymous Network (ATAN). The distributed and decentralized network management in ATAN does not require a central authority so that ATAN alleviates the problem of a single point of failure. In ATAN, the trust and reputation system aims to enhance anonymity by establishing a trust and reputation relationship between the source and the forwarding members. The trust and reputation relationship of any two nodes is adaptive to new information learned by these two nodes or recommended from other trust nodes. Therefore, packets are anonymously routed from the \u27trusted\u27 source to the destination through \u27trusted\u27 intermediate nodes, thereby improving anonymity of communications. In the performance analysis, the ratio of the ATAN header and data payload is around 0.1, which is relatively small.
This dissertation offers analysis on security services on group communications. It illustrates that these security services are needed to incorporate with each other such that group communications can be secure. Furthermore, the adaptive trust and reputation system is proposed to integrate the concept of trust and reputation into communications. Although deploying the trust and reputation system incurs some overheads in terms of storage spaces, bandwidth and computation cycles, it shows a very promising performance that enhance users\u27 confidence in using group communications, and concludes that the trust and reputation system should be deployed as another layer of security services to protect group communications against malicious adversaries and attacks
- …