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

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

Технології безпеки безпроводових і мобільних мереж

Робоча навчальна програма з курсу «Технології безпеки безпроводових і мобільних мереж» є нормативним документом Київського університету імені Бориса Грінченка, який розроблено кафедрою інформаційної та кібернетичної безпеки на основі освітньо-професійної програми підготовки здобувачів другого (магістерського) рівня відповідно до навчального плану спеціальності 125 Кібербезпека, освітньої 125.00.02 «Безпека інформаційних і комунікаційних систем». Робочу навчальну програму укладено згідно з вимогами Європейської кредитної трансферно-накопичувальної системи (ЄКТС) організації навчання. Програма визначає обсяги знань, якими повинен опанувати здобувач другого (магістерського) рівня відповідно до вимог освітньо-кваліфікаційної характеристики, алгоритму вивчення навчального матеріалу дисципліни «Технології безпеки безпроводових і мобільних мереж» та необхідне методичне забезпечення, складові і технологію оцінювання навчальних досягнень студентів. Навчальна дисципліна «Технології безпеки безпроводових і мобільних мереж» складається з трьох змістових модулів: «Загрози для безпроводових технологій і їх аналіз», «Атаки на комерційні безпроводові протоколи», «Забезпечення безпеки безпроводових систем і мереж». Обсяг дисципліни – 210 год. (7 кредитів)

Plaintext Recovery Attacks Against WPA/TKIP

We conduct an analysis of the RC4 algorithm as it is used in the IEEE WPA/TKIP wireless standard. In that standard, RC4 keys are computed on a per-frame basis, with specific key bytes being set to known values that depend on 2 bytes of the WPA frame counter (called the TSC). We observe very large, TSC-dependent biases in the RC4 keystream when the algorithm is keyed according to the WPA specification. These biases permit us to mount an effective statistical, plaintext-recovering attack in the situation where the same plaintext is encrypted in many different frames (the so-called ``broadcast attack\u27\u27 setting). We assess the practical impact of these attacks on WPA/TKIP

Робоча програма навчальної дисципліни "Технології безпеки безпроводових і мобільних мереж"

Робоча навчальна програма з курсу «Технології безпеки безпроводових і мобільних мереж» є нормативним документом Київського університету імені Бориса Грінченка, який розроблено кафедрою інформаційної та кібернетичної безпеки імені професора Володимира Бурячка на основі освітньо-професійної програми підготовки здобувачів другого (магістерського) рівня відповідно до навчального плану спеціальності 125 Кібербезпека, освітньої програми 125.00.02 Безпека інформаційних і комунікаційних систем. Навчальна дисципліна «Технології безпеки безпроводових і мобільних мереж» складається з трьох змістових модулів: «Загрози для безпроводових технологій і їх аналіз», «Атаки на комерційні безпроводові протоколи», «Забезпечення безпеки безпроводових систем і мереж». Обсяг дисципліни – 210 год. (7 кредитів). Метою викладання навчальної дисципліни є формування у студентів уміння вирішувати задачі адміністрування безпроводових і мобільних мереж і систем, застосовувати нормативно-правові, організаційні та технічні процедури при роботі безпроводових і мобільних технологій

Developing a Systematic Process for Mobile Surveying and Analysis of WLAN security

Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), familiarly known as Wi-Fi, is one of the most used wireless networking technologies. WLANs have rapidly grown in popularity since the release of the original IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard in 1997. We are using our beloved wireless internet connection for everything and are connecting more and more devices into our wireless networks in every form imaginable. As the number of wireless network devices keeps increasing, so does the importance of wireless network security. During its now over twenty-year life cycle, a multitude of various security measures and protocols have been introduced into WLAN connections to keep our wireless communication secure. The most notable security measures presented in the 802.11 standard have been the encryption protocols Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). Both encryption protocols have had their share of flaws and vulnerabilities, some of them so severe that the use of WEP and the first generation of the WPA protocol have been deemed irredeemably broken and unfit to be used for WLAN encryption. Even though the aforementioned encryption protocols have been long since deemed fatally broken and insecure, research shows that both can still be found in use today. The purpose of this Master’s Thesis is to develop a process for surveying wireless local area networks and to survey the current state of WLAN security in Finland. The goal has been to develop a WLAN surveying process that would at the same time be efficient, scalable, and easily replicable. The purpose of the survey is to determine to what extent are the deprecated encryption protocols used in Finland. Furthermore, we want to find out in what state is WLAN security currently in Finland by observing the use of other WLAN security practices. The survey process presented in this work is based on a WLAN scanning method called Wardriving. Despite its intimidating name, wardriving is simply a form of passive wireless network scanning. Passive wireless network scanning is used for collecting information about the surrounding wireless networks by listening to the messages broadcasted by wireless network devices. To collect our research data, we conducted wardriving surveys on three separate occasions between the spring of 2019 and early spring of 2020, in a typical medium-sized Finnish city. Our survey results show that 2.2% out of the located networks used insecure encryption protocols and 9.2% of the located networks did not use any encryption protocol. While the percentage of insecure networks is moderately low, we observed during our study that private consumers are reluctant to change the factory-set default settings of their wireless network devices, possibly exposing them to other security threats

Tornado Attack on RC4 with Applications to WEP & WPA

In this paper, we construct several tools for building and manipulating pools of biases in the analysis of RC4. We report extremely fast and optimized active and passive attacks against IEEE 802.11 wireless communication protocol WEP and a key recovery and a distinguishing attack against WPA. This was achieved through a huge amount of theoretical and experimental analysis (capturing WiFi packets), refinement and optimization of all the former known attacks and methodologies against RC4 stream cipher in WEP and WPA modes. We support all our claims on WEP by providing an implementation of this attack as a publicly available patch on Aircrack-ng. Our new attack improves its success probability drastically. Our active attack, based on ARP injection, requires 22500 packets to gain success probability of 50\% against a 104-bit WEP key, using Aircrack-ng in non-interactive mode. It runs in less than 5 seconds on an off-the-shelf PC. Using the same number of packets, Aicrack-ng yields around 3\% success rate. Furthermore, we describe very fast passive only attacks by just eavesdropping TCP/IPv4 packets in a WiFi communication. Our passive attack requires 27500 packets. This is much less than the number of packets Aircrack-ng requires in active mode (around 37500), which is a huge improvement. Deploying a similar theory, we also describe several attacks on WPA. Firstly, we describe a distinguisher for WPA with complexity 2^{42} and advantage 0.5 which uses 2^{42} packets. Then, based on several partial temporary key recovery attacks, we recover the full 128-bit temporary key of WPA by using 2^{42} packets. It works with complexity 2^{96}. So far, this is the best key recovery attack against WPA. We believe that our analysis brings on further insight to the security of RC4

Security protocols suite for machine-to-machine systems

Nowadays, the great diffusion of advanced devices, such as smart-phones, has shown that there is a growing trend to rely on new technologies to generate and/or support progress; the society is clearly ready to trust on next-generation communication systems to face today’s concerns on economic and social fields. The reason for this sociological change is represented by the fact that the technologies have been open to all users, even if the latter do not necessarily have a specific knowledge in this field, and therefore the introduction of new user-friendly applications has now appeared as a business opportunity and a key factor to increase the general cohesion among all citizens. Within the actors of this technological evolution, wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are becoming of great importance. These wireless networks are made up of interconnected low-power devices that are able to provide a great variety of services with little or even no user intervention. Examples of these services can be fleet management, fire detection, utilities consumption (water and energy distribution, etc.) or patients monitoring. However, since any arising technology goes together with its security threats, which have to be faced, further studies are necessary to secure wireless M2M technology. In this context, main threats are those related to attacks to the services availability and to the privacy of both the subscribers’ and the services providers’ data. Taking into account the often limited resources of the M2M devices at the hardware level, ensuring the availability and privacy requirements in the range of M2M applications while minimizing the waste of valuable resources is even more challenging. Based on the above facts, this Ph. D. thesis is aimed at providing efficient security solutions for wireless M2M networks that effectively reduce energy consumption of the network while not affecting the overall security services of the system. With this goal, we first propose a coherent taxonomy of M2M network that allows us to identify which security topics deserve special attention and which entities or specific services are particularly threatened. Second, we define an efficient, secure-data aggregation scheme that is able to increase the network lifetime by optimizing the energy consumption of the devices. Third, we propose a novel physical authenticator or frame checker that minimizes the communication costs in wireless channels and that successfully faces exhaustion attacks. Fourth, we study specific aspects of typical key management schemes to provide a novel protocol which ensures the distribution of secret keys for all the cryptographic methods used in this system. Fifth, we describe the collaboration with the WAVE2M community in order to define a proper frame format actually able to support the necessary security services, including the ones that we have already proposed; WAVE2M was funded to promote the global use of an emerging wireless communication technology for ultra-low and long-range services. And finally sixth, we provide with an accurate analysis of privacy solutions that actually fit M2M-networks services’ requirements. All the analyses along this thesis are corroborated by simulations that confirm significant improvements in terms of efficiency while supporting the necessary security requirements for M2M networks

Security aspects of OSPF as a MANET routing protocol

OSPF, Open Shortest Path First, is an Intra-gateway routing protocol first developed as an IETF effort. It is widely adopted in large enterprise-scale networks, being well regarded for its fast convergence and loop-free routing. It is versatile in terms of which interface types it supports, such as point-to-point links or broadcast networks. It also offers scalability through hierarchical routing and by using centralization to reduce the amount of overhead on networks which have broadcast or broadcast-similar properties. An interface type missing from the standard so far is that of a wireless network, characterized by non-guaranteed bidirectional links combined with unreliable broadcasting, and existing interface types generally perform poorly under these networks. The IETF has therefore instituted a Working Group to standardize such an interface type extension to the latest version, OSPF version 3. This interface type will permit mobility and multi-hop characteristics in addition to those of wireless links in general. Such networks are usually referred to as Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET). MANET routing protocols are subject to more severe security issues than ordinary, wireline-oriented protocols are. This thesis aims to indentify key security aspects of OSPF as a MANET routing protocol

Falsification Attacks against WPA-TKIP in a Realistic Environment

In this paper, we propose two new falsification attacks against Wi-Fi Protected Access Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (WPA-TKIP). A previous realistic attack succeeds only for a network that supports IEEE 802.11e QoS features by both an access point (AP) and a client, and it has an execution time of 12-15min, in which it recovers a message integrity code (MIC) key from an ARP packet. Our first attack reduces the execution time for recovering a MIC key. It can recover the MIC key within 7-8min. Our second attack expands its targets that can be attacked. This attack focuses on a new vulnerability of QoS packet processing, and this vulnerability can remove the condition that the AP supports IEEE 802.11e. In addition, we discovered another vulnerability by which our attack succeeds under the condition that the chipset of the client supports IEEE 802.11e even if the client disables this standard through the OS. We demonstrate that chipsets developed by several kinds of vendors have the same vulnerability