1,703 research outputs found

    A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

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    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

    Kerberos based authentication for inter-domain roaming in wireless heterogeneous network

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    AbstractAn increased demand in ubiquitous high speed wireless access has led integration of different wireless technologies provided by different administrative domains creating truly a heterogeneous network. Security is one of the major hurdles in such network environment. As a mobile station moves in and out of the coverage area of one wireless network to another, it needs to be authenticated. The existing protocols for authentication of a mobile station are typically centralized, where the home network participates in each authentication process. It requires home network to maintain roaming agreement with all other visiting networks. Moreover, the round trip time to home network results high latency. This paper is focused on developing authentication protocol for wireless network irrespective of the technologies or the administrative domain. We propose a secure protocol which adopts strong features of Kerberos based on tickets for rigorous mutual authentication and session key establishment along with issuance of token so that the mobile station can have access to not only the roaming partner of home network but also to the roaming partner of previous visited networks. The performance evaluation and comparative analysis of the proposed protocol is carried out with the already implemented standard protocols and most remarkable research works till date to confirm the solidity of the results presented

    Secure 3G user authentication in ad-hoc serving networks

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    The convergence of cellular and IP technologies has pushed the integration of 3G and WLAN networks to the forefront. With 3G networks\u27 failure to deliver feasible bandwidth to the customer and the emerging popularity, ease of use and high throughput of 802.11 WLANs, integrating secure access to 3G services from WLANs has become a primary focus. 3G user authentication initiated from WLANs has been defined by an enhancement to the extensible authentication protocol, EAP, used to transport user authentication requests over WLANs. The EAP-AKA protocol executes the 3G USIM user challenge and response authentication process over the IP backbone for WLAN serving networks. To improve the degree of control of 3G subscribers, spatial control has been proposed for 3G-WLAN user authentication. Successful execution of 3G security algorithms can be limited to a specified area by encrypting a user\u27s authentication challenge with spatial data defining his/her visited WLAN. With 3G networks\u27 limited capacity to determine a user\u27s location to the granularity of a small WLAN area and restricted access to users\u27 location due to privacy, 3G operators must rely on spatial data sent from visited WLANs to implement control for authentication. The risks of implementing EAP-AKA spatial control by 3G operators with no prior relationship or trust for serving WLAN networks are presented in this paper. An ad-hoc architecture is proposed for serving networks in 3G-WLAN integration and the advantages of this architecture that facilitate secure 3G user authentication are identified. Algorithms are proposed to define robust trust relationships between the parties in 3G-WLAN networks. The security of 3G user authentication is further protected by new mechanisms defined that are based on the quality of trust established between parties

    A Survey on Security and Privacy of 5G Technologies: Potential Solutions, Recent Advancements, and Future Directions

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    Security has become the primary concern in many telecommunications industries today as risks can have high consequences. Especially, as the core and enable technologies will be associated with 5G network, the confidential information will move at all layers in future wireless systems. Several incidents revealed that the hazard encountered by an infected wireless network, not only affects the security and privacy concerns, but also impedes the complex dynamics of the communications ecosystem. Consequently, the complexity and strength of security attacks have increased in the recent past making the detection or prevention of sabotage a global challenge. From the security and privacy perspectives, this paper presents a comprehensive detail on the core and enabling technologies, which are used to build the 5G security model; network softwarization security, PHY (Physical) layer security and 5G privacy concerns, among others. Additionally, the paper includes discussion on security monitoring and management of 5G networks. This paper also evaluates the related security measures and standards of core 5G technologies by resorting to different standardization bodies and provide a brief overview of 5G standardization security forces. Furthermore, the key projects of international significance, in line with the security concerns of 5G and beyond are also presented. Finally, a future directions and open challenges section has included to encourage future research.European CommissionNational Research Tomsk Polytechnic UniversityUpdate citation details during checkdate report - A

    Will SDN be part of 5G?

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    For many, this is no longer a valid question and the case is considered settled with SDN/NFV (Software Defined Networking/Network Function Virtualization) providing the inevitable innovation enablers solving many outstanding management issues regarding 5G. However, given the monumental task of softwarization of radio access network (RAN) while 5G is just around the corner and some companies have started unveiling their 5G equipment already, the concern is very realistic that we may only see some point solutions involving SDN technology instead of a fully SDN-enabled RAN. This survey paper identifies all important obstacles in the way and looks at the state of the art of the relevant solutions. This survey is different from the previous surveys on SDN-based RAN as it focuses on the salient problems and discusses solutions proposed within and outside SDN literature. Our main focus is on fronthaul, backward compatibility, supposedly disruptive nature of SDN deployment, business cases and monetization of SDN related upgrades, latency of general purpose processors (GPP), and additional security vulnerabilities, softwarization brings along to the RAN. We have also provided a summary of the architectural developments in SDN-based RAN landscape as not all work can be covered under the focused issues. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the state of the art of SDN-based RAN and clearly points out the gaps in the technology.Comment: 33 pages, 10 figure

    Secure Identification in Social Wireless Networks

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    The applications based on social networking have brought revolution towards social life and are continuously gaining popularity among the Internet users. Due to the advanced computational resources offered by the innovative hardware and nominal subscriber charges of network operators, most of the online social networks are transforming into the mobile domain by offering exciting applications and games exclusively designed for users on the go. Moreover, the mobile devices are considered more personal as compared to their desktop rivals, so there is a tendency among the mobile users to store sensitive data like contacts, passwords, bank account details, updated calendar entries with key dates and personal notes on their devices. The Project Social Wireless Network Secure Identification (SWIN) is carried out at Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) to explore the practicality of providing the secure mobile social networking portal with advanced security features to tackle potential security threats by extending the existing methods with more innovative security technologies. In addition to the extensive background study and the determination of marketable use-cases with their corresponding security requirements, this thesis proposes a secure identification design to satisfy the security dimensions for both online and offline peers. We have implemented an initial prototype using PHP Socket and OpenSSL library to simulate the secure identification procedure based on the proposed design. The design is in compliance with 3GPP‟s Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA) and our implementation has demonstrated the flexibility of the solution to be applied independently for the applications requiring secure identification. Finally, the thesis provides strong foundation for the advanced implementation on mobile platform in future

    Next generation mobile wireless hybrid network interworking architecture

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    It is a universally stated design requirement that next generation mobile systems will be compatible and interoperable with IPv6 and with various access technologies such as IEEE 802.11x. Discussion in the literature is currently as to whether the recently developed High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) or the developing Long Term Evaluation (LTE) technology is appropriate for the next generation mobile wireless system. However, the HSPA and the LTE technologies are not sufficient in their current form to provide ubiquitous data services. The third–generation mobile wireless network (3G) provides a highly developed global service to customers through either circuit switched or packet switched networks; new mobile multimedia services (e.g. streaming/mobile TV, location base services, downloads, multiuser games and other applications) that provide greater flexibility for the operator to introduce new services to its portfolio and from the user point of view, more services to select and a variety of higher, on-demand data rates compared with 2.5-2.75G mobile wireless system. However cellular networks suffer from a limited data rate and expensive deployment. In contrast, wireless local area networks (WLAN) are deployed widely in small areas or hotspots, because of their cost-effectiveness, ease of deployment and high data rates in an unlicensed frequency band. On the other hand, WLAN (IEEE 802.11x) cannot provide wide coverage cost-efficiently and is therefore at a disadvantage to 3G in the provision of wide coverage. In order to provide more services at high data rates in the hotspots and campus-wide areas, 3G service providers regard WLAN as a technology that compliments the 3G mobile wireless system. The recent evolution and successful deployment of WLANs worldwide has yielded demand to integrate WLANs with 3G mobile wireless technologies seamlessly. The key goal of this integration is to develop heterogeneous mobile data networks, capable of supporting ubiquitous data services with high data rates in hotspots. The effort to develop heterogeneous networks – also referred to fourth-generation (4G) mobile wireless data networks – is linked with many technical challenges including seamless vertical handovers across WLAN and 3G radio technologies, security, common authentication, unified accounting & billing, WLAN sharing (by several mobile wireless networks – different operators), consistent QoS and service provisioning, etc. This research included modelling a hybrid UMTS/WLAN network with two competent couplings: Tight Coupling and Loose Coupling. The coupling techniques were used in conjunction with EAP-AKA for authentication and Mobile IP for mobility management. The research provides an analysis of the coupling techniques and highlights the advantages and disadvantages of the coupling techniques. A large matrix of performance figures were generated for each of the coupling techniques using Opnet Modeller, a network simulation tool
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