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

Energy efficient privacy preserved data gathering in wireless sensor networks having multiple sinks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) generally have a many-to-one structure so that event information flows from sensors to a unique sink. In recent WSN applications, many-tomany structures are evolved due to need for conveying collected event information to multiple sinks at the same time. This study proposes an anonymity method bases on k-anonymity for preventing record disclosure of collected event information in WSNs. Proposed method takes the anonymity requirements of multiple sinks into consideration by providing different levels of privacy for each destination sink. Attributes, which may identify of an event owner, are generalized or encrypted in order to meet the different anonymity requirements of sinks. Privacy guaranteed event information can be multicasted to all sinks instead of sending to each sink one by one. Since minimization of energy consumption is an important design criteria for WSNs, our method enables us to multicast the same event information to multiple sinks and reduce energy consumption

An analysis of the lifetime of OLSR networks

The Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol is a well-known route discovery protocol for ad-hoc networks. OLSR optimizes the flooding of link state information through the network using multipoint relays (MPRs). Only nodes selected as MPRs are responsible for forwarding control traffic. Many research papers aim to optimize the selection of MPRs with a specific purpose in mind: e.g., to minimize their number, to keep paths with high Quality of Service or to maximize the network lifetime (the time until the first node runs out of energy). In such analyzes often the effects of the network structure on the MPR selection are not taken into account. In this paper we show that the structure of the network can have a large impact on the MPR selection. In highly regular structures (such as grids) there is even no variation in the MPR sets that result from various MPR selection mechanisms. Furthermore, we study the influence of the network structure on the network lifetime problem in a setting where at regular intervals messages are broadcasted using MPRs. We introduce the ’maximum forcedness ratio’, as a key parameter of the network to describe how much variation there is in the lifetime results of various MPR selection heuristics. Although we focus our attention to OLSR, being a widely implemented protocol, on a more abstract level our results describe the structure of connected sets dominating the 2-hop neighborhood of a node

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

A two‐step authentication framework for Mobile ad hoc networks

The lack of fixed infrastructure in ad hoc networks causes nodes to rely more heavily on peer nodes for communication. Nevertheless, establishing trust in such a distributed environment is very difficult, since it is not straightforward for a node to determine if its peer nodes can be trusted. An additional concern in such an environment is with whether a peer node is merely relaying a message or if it is the originator of the message. In this paper, we propose an authentication approach for protecting nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. The security requirements for protecting data link and network layers are identified and the design criteria for creating secure ad hoc networks using several authentication protocols are analyzed. Protocols based on zero knowledge and challenge response techniques are presented and their performance is evaluated through analysis and simulation

Resilient networking in wireless sensor networks

This report deals with security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially in network layer. Multiple secure routing protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, they often use the cryptography to secure routing functionalities. The cryptography alone is not enough to defend against multiple attacks due to the node compromise. Therefore, we need more algorithmic solutions. In this report, we focus on the behavior of routing protocols to determine which properties make them more resilient to attacks. Our aim is to find some answers to the following questions. Are there any existing protocols, not designed initially for security, but which already contain some inherently resilient properties against attacks under which some portion of the network nodes is compromised? If yes, which specific behaviors are making these protocols more resilient? We propose in this report an overview of security strategies for WSNs in general, including existing attacks and defensive measures. In this report we focus at the network layer in particular, and an analysis of the behavior of four particular routing protocols is provided to determine their inherent resiliency to insider attacks. The protocols considered are: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Gradient-Based Routing (GBR), Greedy Forwarding (GF) and Random Walk Routing (RWR)

Routing in mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is built on the fly where a number of wireless mobile nodes work in cooperation without the engagement of any centralized access point or any fixed infrastructure. Two nodes in such a network can communicate in a bidirectional manner if and only if the distance between them is at most the minimum of their transmission ranges. When a node wants to communicate with a node outside its transmission range, a multihop routing strategy is used which involves some intermediate nodes. Because of the movements of nodes, there is a constant possibility of topology change in MANET. Considering this unique aspect of MANET, a number of routing protocols have been proposed so far. This chapter gives an overview of the past, current, and future research areas for routing in MANET. In this chapter we will learn about the following things: - The preliminaries of mobile ad hoc network - The challenges for routing in MANET - Expected properties of a MANET routing protocol - Categories of routing protocols for MANET - Major routing protocols for MANET - Criteria for performance comparison of the routing protocols for MANET - Achievements and future research directions - Expectations and realit

Secure Routing Environment with Enhancing QoS in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

A mobile adhoc network is infrastructure-free and self configured network connected without wire. As it is infrastructure-free and no centralized control, such type of network are suitable only for conditional inter communication link. So initially maintaining Quality of Service and security aware routing is a difficult task. The main purpose of QoS aware routing is to find an optimal secure route from source to destination which will satisfy two or more QoS constrain. In this paper, we propose a net based multicasting routing scheme to discovery all possible secure path using Secure closest spot trust certification protocol (SCSTC) and the optimal link path is derived from Dolphin Echolocation algorithm (DEA). The numerical result and performance analysis clearly describe that our provided proposal routing protocol generates better packet delivery ratio, decreases packet delay reduces overhead in secured environment