1,741 research outputs found
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
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
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
Secure key design approaches using entropy harvesting in wireless sensor network: A survey
Physical layer based security design in wireless sensor networks have gained much importance since the past decade. The various constraints associated with such networks coupled with other factors such as their deployment mainly in remote areas, nature of communication etc. are responsible for development of research works where the focus is secured key generation, extraction, and sharing. Keeping the importance of such works in mind, this survey is undertaken that provides a vivid description of the different mechanisms adopted for securely generating the key as well its randomness extraction and also sharing. This survey work not only concentrates on the more common methods, like received signal strength based but also goes on to describe other uncommon strategies such as accelerometer based. We first discuss the three fundamental steps viz. randomness extraction, key generation and sharing and their importance in physical layer based security design. We then review existing secure key generation, extraction, and sharing mechanisms and also discuss their pros and cons. In addition, we present a comprehensive comparative study of the recent advancements in secure key generation, sharing, and randomness extraction approaches on the basis of adversary, secret bit generation rate, energy efficiency etc. Finally, the survey wraps up with some promising future research directions in this area
Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks
This chapter discusses the need of security and privacy protection mechanisms
in aggregation protocols used in wireless sensor networks (WSN). It presents a
comprehensive state of the art discussion on the various privacy protection
mechanisms used in WSNs and particularly focuses on the CPDA protocols proposed
by He et al. (INFOCOM 2007). It identifies a security vulnerability in the CPDA
protocol and proposes a mechanism to plug that vulnerability. To demonstrate
the need of security in aggregation process, the chapter further presents
various threats in WSN aggregation mechanisms. A large number of existing
protocols for secure aggregation in WSN are discussed briefly and a protocol is
proposed for secure aggregation which can detect false data injected by
malicious nodes in a WSN. The performance of the protocol is also presented.
The chapter concludes while highlighting some future directions of research in
secure data aggregation in WSNs.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, 3 table
e-SAFE: Secure, Efficient and Forensics-Enabled Access to Implantable Medical Devices
To facilitate monitoring and management, modern Implantable Medical Devices
(IMDs) are often equipped with wireless capabilities, which raise the risk of
malicious access to IMDs. Although schemes are proposed to secure the IMD
access, some issues are still open. First, pre-sharing a long-term key between
a patient's IMD and a doctor's programmer is vulnerable since once the doctor's
programmer is compromised, all of her patients suffer; establishing a temporary
key by leveraging proximity gets rid of pre-shared keys, but as the approach
lacks real authentication, it can be exploited by nearby adversaries or through
man-in-the-middle attacks. Second, while prolonging the lifetime of IMDs is one
of the most important design goals, few schemes explore to lower the
communication and computation overhead all at once. Finally, how to safely
record the commands issued by doctors for the purpose of forensics, which can
be the last measure to protect the patients' rights, is commonly omitted in the
existing literature. Motivated by these important yet open problems, we propose
an innovative scheme e-SAFE, which significantly improves security and safety,
reduces the communication overhead and enables IMD-access forensics. We present
a novel lightweight compressive sensing based encryption algorithm to encrypt
and compress the IMD data simultaneously, reducing the data transmission
overhead by over 50% while ensuring high data confidentiality and usability.
Furthermore, we provide a suite of protocols regarding device pairing,
dual-factor authentication, and accountability-enabled access. The security
analysis and performance evaluation show the validity and efficiency of the
proposed scheme
NECESSITY TO SECURE WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK
Wireless sensor networks are often deployed in hostile and unattended environments. The nodes will be failure by fault, intrusion and battery exhaustion. Node - failure tolerance is an acceptable method to improve the networks lifetime. In this paper, two key problems for topology control are presented: first, how to get a node - failure topology when there is intrusion from the nodes of hostile enemies? Secondly , how to sustain this node - failure topology with all deployed node s being exhausted ultimately? Here we suggest a novel approach for topology control and prove that it is node - failure tolerant. The approach contains three phases: topology discovery, topology update, and topology regeneration. A tricolor - based method is proposed to build architecture with high tolerance ability and some security protocols are employed to preclude the hostile nodes in discovery phase. In update and regeneration phases, the newly deployed nodes are regarded as renewable resource to fill in the consumed energy, enhance the debased node - failure tolerance ability, prolong network lifetime d . A security protocol with forward and backward secrecy is devised to adapt the topology changed by node failure and node joining. Some attributes of the presented method are shown by simulations, and differences a re given by comparison with related work
A Key Establishment Scheme for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks Using Post-Deployment Knowledge
Establishment of pairwise keys between sensor nodes in a sensor network is a
difficult problem due to resource limitations of sensor nodes as well as
vulnerability to physical captures of sensor nodes by the enemy. Public-key
cryptosystems are not much suited for most resource-constrained sensor
networks. Recently, elliptic curve cryptographic techniques show that public
key cryptosystem is also feasible for resource-constrained sensor networks.
However, most researchers accept that the symmetric key cryptosystems are
viable options for resource-constrained sensor networks. In this paper, we
first develop a basic principle to address the key pre-distribution problem in
mobile sensor networks. Then, using this developed basic principle, we propose
a scheme which takes the advantage of the post-deployment knowledge. Our scheme
is a modified version of the key prioritization technique proposed by Liu and
Ning. Our improved scheme provides reasonable network connectivity and
security. Moreover, the proposed scheme works for any deployment topology.Comment: Published in International Journal of Computer Networks &
Communications (IJCNC) Vol.3, No.4, July 201
An Outline of Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Threats, Countermeasures and Implementations
With the expansion of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the need for securing
the data flow through these networks is increasing. These sensor networks allow
for easy-to-apply and flexible installations which have enabled them to be used
for numerous applications. Due to these properties, they face distinct
information security threats. Security of the data flowing through across
networks provides the researchers with an interesting and intriguing potential
for research. Design of these networks to ensure the protection of data faces
the constraints of limited power and processing resources. We provide the
basics of wireless sensor network security to help the researchers and
engineers in better understanding of this applications field. In this chapter,
we will provide the basics of information security with special emphasis on
WSNs. The chapter will also give an overview of the information security
requirements in these networks. Threats to the security of data in WSNs and
some of their counter measures are also presented
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