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

LPKI - A Lightweight Public Key Infrastructure for the Mobile Environments

The non-repudiation as an essential requirement of many applications can be provided by the asymmetric key model. With the evolution of new applications such as mobile commerce, it is essential to provide secure and efficient solutions for the mobile environments. The traditional public key cryptography involves huge computational costs and is not so suitable for the resource-constrained platforms. The elliptic curve-based approaches as the newer solutions require certain considerations that are not taken into account in the traditional public key infrastructures. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a Lightweight Public Key Infrastructure (LPKI) for the constrained platforms such as mobile phones. It takes advantages of elliptic curve cryptography and signcryption to decrease the computational costs and communication overheads, and adapting to the constraints. All the computational costs of required validations can be eliminated from end-entities by introduction of a validation authority to the introduced infrastructure and delegating validations to such a component. LPKI is so suitable for mobile environments and for applications such as mobile commerce where the security is the great concern.Comment: 6 Pages, 6 Figure

A novel key management protocol for vehicular cloud security

Vehicular cloud computing (VCC) is a new hybrid technology which has become an outstanding area of research. VCC combines salient features of cloud computing and wireless communication technology to help drivers in network connectivity, storage space availability and applications. VCC is formed by dynamic cloud formation by moving vehicles. Security plays an important role in VCC communication. Key management is one of the important tasks for security of VCC. This paper proposes a novel key management protocol for VCC security. Proposed scheme is based on Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC). The simulation results demonstrated that the proposed protocol is efficient compared to existing key management algorithms in terms of key generation time, memory usage and cpu utilization

A-MAKE: an efficient, anonymous and accountable authentication framework for WMNs

In this paper, we propose a framework, named as A-MAKE, which efficiently provides security, privacy, and accountability for communications in wireless mesh networks. More specifically, the framework provides an anonymous mutual authentication protocol whereby legitimate users can connect to network from anywhere without being identified or tracked. No single party (e.g., network operator) can violate the privacy of a user, which is provided in our framework in the strongest sense. Our framework utilizes group signatures, where the private key and the credentials of the users are generated through a secure three-party protocol. User accountability is implemented via user revocation protocol that can be executed by two semitrusted authorities, one of which is the network operator. The assumptions about the trust level of the network operator are relaxed. Our framework makes use of much more efficient signature generation and verification algorithms in terms of computation complexity than their counterparts in literature, where signature size is comparable to the shortest signatures proposed for similar purposes so far

Key exchange with the help of a public ledger

Blockchains and other public ledger structures promise a new way to create globally consistent event logs and other records. We make use of this consistency property to detect and prevent man-in-the-middle attacks in a key exchange such as Diffie-Hellman or ECDH. Essentially, the MitM attack creates an inconsistency in the world views of the two honest parties, and they can detect it with the help of the ledger. Thus, there is no need for prior knowledge or trusted third parties apart from the distributed ledger. To prevent impersonation attacks, we require user interaction. It appears that, in some applications, the required user interaction is reduced in comparison to other user-assisted key-exchange protocols

Improving efficiency and security of IIoT communications using in-network validation of server certificate

The use of advanced communications and smart mechanisms in industry is growing rapidly, making cybersecurity a critical aspect. Currently, most industrial communication protocols rely on the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol to build their secure version, providing confidentiality, integrity and authentication. In the case of UDP-based communications, frequently used in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) scenarios, the counterpart of TLS is Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS), which includes some mechanisms to deal with the high unreliability of the transport layer. However, the (D)TLS handshake is a heavy process, specially for resource-deprived IIoT devices and frequently, security is sacrificed in favour of performance. More specifically, the validation of digital certificates is an expensive process from the time and resource consumption point of view. For this reason, digital certificates are not always properly validated by IIoT devices, including the verification of their revocation status; and when it is done, it introduces an important delay in the communications. In this context, this paper presents the design and implementation of an in-network server certificate validation system that offloads this task from the constrained IIoT devices to a resource-richer network element, leveraging data plane programming (DPP). This approach enhances security as it guarantees that a comprehensive server certificate verification is always performed. Additionally, it increases performance as resource-expensive tasks are moved from IIoT devices to a resource-richer network element. Results show that the proposed solution reduces DTLS handshake times by 50–60 %. Furthermore, CPU use in IIoT devices is also reduced, resulting in an energy saving of about 40 % in such devices.This work was financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the TRUE-5G project PID2019-108713RB-C54/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. It was also partially supported by the Ayudas Cervera para Centros Tecnológicos grant of the Spanish Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) under the project EGIDA (CER-20191012), and by the Basque Country Government under the ELKARTEK Program, project REMEDY - Real tiME control and embeddeD securitY (KK-2021/00091)

A transparent distributed ledger-based certificate revocation scheme for VANETs

The widespread adoption of Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Mobility (CCAM) applications requires the implementation of stringent security mechanisms to minimize the surface of cyber attacks. Authentication is an effective process for validating user identity in vehicular networks. However, authentication alone is not enough to prevent dangerous attack situations. Existing security mechanisms are not able to promptly revoke the credentials of misbehaving vehicles, thus tolerate malicious actors to remain trusted in the system for a long time. The resulting vulnerability window allows the implementation of complex attacks, thus posing a substantial impairment to the security of the vehicular ecosystem. In this paper we propose a Distributed Ledger-based Vehicular Revocation Scheme that improves the state of the art by providing a vulnerability window lower than 1 s, reducing well-behaved vehicles exposure to sophisticated and potentially dangerous attacks. The proposed scheme harnesses the advantages of the underlying Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to implement a privacy-aware revocation process while being fully transparent to all participating entities. Furthermore, it meets the critical message processing times defined by EU and US standards, thus closing a critical gap in the current international standards. Theoretical analysis and experimental validation demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme, where DLT streamlines the revocation operation overhead and delivers an economically viable yet scalable solution against cyber attacks on vehicular systems