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

AODVSEC: A Novel Approach to Secure Ad Hoc on-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing Protocol from Insider Attacks in MANETs

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that can communicate with each other using multihop wireless links without requiring any fixed based-station infrastructure and centralized management. Each node in the network acts as both a host and a router. In such scenario, designing of an efficient, reliable and secure routing protocol has been a major challenging issue over the last many years. Numerous schemes have been proposed for secure routing protocols and most of the research work has so far focused on providing security for routing using cryptography. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to secure Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol from the insider attacks launched through active forging of its Route Reply (RREP) control message. AODV routing protocol does not have any security provision that makes it less reliable in publicly open ad hoc network. To deal with the concerned security attacks, we have proposed AODV Security Extension (AODVSEC) which enhances the scope of AODV for the security provision. We have compared AODVSEC with AODV and Secure AODV (SAODV) in normal situation as well as in presence of the three concerned attacks viz. Resource Consumption (RC) attack, Route Disturb (RD) attack, Route Invasion (RI) attack and Blackhole (BH) attack. To evaluate the performances, we have considered Packet Delivery Fraction (PDF), Average End-to-End Delay (AED), Average Throughput (AT), Normalized Routing Load (NRL) and Average Jitter and Accumulated Average Processing Time.Comment: 20 Pages, 24 Figure

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

A secure and lightweight ad-hoc routing algorithm for personal networks

Over the past few years, there has been increasing interest in utilizing Personal Area Networks (PANs) to offer users innovative and personalized services. This interest is a consequence of the widespread use of mobile devices such as laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, digital cameras, wireless headsets, etc. to carry out a variety of user-centric tasks. The PAN itself is built upon an ad-hoc network where devices trust their neighbors to route their packets. The cooperative nature of ad-hoc networks allows malicious nodes to easily cripple the network by inserting false route information, replaying old messages, modifying messages of other nodes, etc. An applicable area still under research, and the focus of this paper, is secure routing protocols for ad-hoc networks. To achieve availability in the PAN, the routing protocol used must be robust against both dynamically changing topology and malicious attacks. However, the heterogeneous nature of Personal Network (PN) devices means that traditional security mechanisms are too resource intensive to be sufficient by themselves. This paper describes a new ad-hoc secure routing protocol for Personal Networks (PNs), suitable in a limited multi-hop scenario. This protocol is based on ADOV and relies on efficient cryptographic primitives to safeguard the security and privacy of PN users. Following that, a number of attacks in the area of ad-hoc networks are discussed, and it is shown that the new algorithm protects against multiple un-coordinated active attackers, in spite of compromised nodes in the network

Securing routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is more prone to security threats than other wired and wireless networks because of the distributed nature of the network. Conventional MANET routing protocols assume that all nodes cooperate without maliciously disrupting the operation of the protocol and do not provide defence against attackers. Blackhole and flooding attacks have a dramatic negative impact while grayhole and selfish attacks have a little negative impact on the performance of MANET routing protocols. Malicious nodes or misbehaviour actions detection in the network is an important task to maintain the proper routing protocol operation. Current solutions cannot guarantee the true classification of nodes because the cooperative nature of the MANETs which leads to false exclusions of innocent nodes and/or good classification of malicious nodes. The thesis introduces a new concept of Self- Protocol Trustiness (SPT) to discover malicious nodes with a very high trustiness ratio of a node classification. Designing and implementing new mechanisms that can resist flooding and blackhole attacks which have high negative impacts on the performance of these reactive protocols is the main objective of the thesis. The design of these mechanisms is based on SPT concept to ensure the high trustiness ratio of node classification. In addition, they neither incorporate the use of cryptographic algorithms nor depend on routing packet formats which make these solutions robust and reliable, and simplify their implementations in different MANET reactive protocols. Anti-Flooding (AF) mechanism is designed to resist flooding attacks which relies on locally applied timers and thresholds to classify nodes as malicious. Although AF mechanism succeeded in discovering malicious nodes within a small time, it has a number of thresholds that enable attacker to subvert the algorithm and cannot guarantee that the excluded nodes are genuine malicious nodes which was the motivation to develop this algorithm. On the other hand, Flooding Attack Resisting Mechanism (FARM) is designed to close the security gaps and overcome the drawbacks of AF mechanism. It succeeded in detecting and excluding more than 80% of flooding nodes within the simulation time with a very high trustiness ratio. Anti-Blackhole (AB) mechanism is designed to resist blackhole attacks and relies on a single threshold. The algorithm guarantees 100% exclusion of blackhole nodes and does not exclude any innocent node that may forward a reply packet. Although AB mechanism succeeded in discovering malicious nodes within a small time, the only suggested threshold enables an attacker to subvert the algorithm which was the motivation to develop it. On the other hand, Blackhole Resisting Mechanism (BRM) has the main advantages of AB mechanism while it is designed to close the security gaps and overcome the drawbacks of AB mechanism. It succeeded in detecting and excluding the vast majority of blackhole nodes within the simulation time

A Review of the Energy Efficient and Secure Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

This paper presents a thorough survey of recent work addressing energy efficient multicast routing protocols and secure multicast routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). There are so many issues and solutions which witness the need of energy management and security in ad hoc wireless networks. The objective of a multicast routing protocol for MANETs is to support the propagation of data from a sender to all the receivers of a multicast group while trying to use the available bandwidth efficiently in the presence of frequent topology changes. Multicasting can improve the efficiency of the wireless link when sending multiple copies of messages by exploiting the inherent broadcast property of wireless transmission. Secure multicast routing plays a significant role in MANETs. However, offering energy efficient and secure multicast routing is a difficult and challenging task. In recent years, various multicast routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. These protocols have distinguishing features and use different mechanismsComment: 15 page