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

Password Cracking and Countermeasures in Computer Security: A Survey

With the rapid development of internet technologies, social networks, and other related areas, user authentication becomes more and more important to protect the data of the users. Password authentication is one of the widely used methods to achieve authentication for legal users and defense against intruders. There have been many password cracking methods developed during the past years, and people have been designing the countermeasures against password cracking all the time. However, we find that the survey work on the password cracking research has not been done very much. This paper is mainly to give a brief review of the password cracking methods, import technologies of password cracking, and the countermeasures against password cracking that are usually designed at two stages including the password design stage (e.g. user education, dynamic password, use of tokens, computer generations) and after the design (e.g. reactive password checking, proactive password checking, password encryption, access control). The main objective of this work is offering the abecedarian IT security professionals and the common audiences with some knowledge about the computer security and password cracking, and promoting the development of this area.Comment: add copyright to the tables to the original authors, add acknowledgement to helpe

Protector Control PC-AODV-BH in The Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper we deal with the protector control that which we used to secure AODV routing protocol in Ad Hoc networks. The considered system can be vulnerable to several attacks because of mobility and absence of infrastructure. While the disturbance is assumed to be of the black hole type, we purpose a control named "PC-AODV-BH" in order to neutralize the effects of malicious nodes. Such a protocol is obtained by coupling hash functions, digital signatures and fidelity concept. An implementation under NS2 simulator will be given to compare our proposed approach with SAODV protocol, basing on three performance metrics and taking into account the number of black hole malicious nodesComment: submit 15 pages, 19 figures, 1 table, Journal Indexing team, AIRCC 201

Trust-based security for the OLSR routing protocol

International audienceThe trust is always present implicitly in the protocols based on cooperation, in particular, between the entities involved in routing operations in Ad hoc networks. Indeed, as the wireless range of such nodes is limited, the nodes mutually cooperate with their neighbors in order to extend the remote nodes and the entire network. In our work, we are interested by trust as security solution for OLSR protocol. This approach fits particularly with characteristics of ad hoc networks. Moreover, the explicit trust management allows entities to reason with and about trust, and to take decisions regarding other entities. In this paper, we detail the techniques and the contributions in trust-based security in OLSR. We present trust-based analysis of the OLSR protocol using trust specification language, and we show how trust-based reasoning can allow each node to evaluate the behavior of the other nodes. After the detection of misbehaving nodes, we propose solutions of prevention and countermeasures to resolve the situations of inconsistency, and counter the malicious nodes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution taking different simulated attacks scenarios. Our approach brings few modifications and is still compatible with the bare OLSR

SEAD-FHC: Secure Efficient Distance Vector Routing with Fixed Hash Chain length

Ad hoc networks are highly dynamic routing networks cooperated by a collection of wireless mobile hosts without any assistance of a centralized access point. Secure Efficient Ad hoc Distance Vector (SEAD) is a proactive routing protocol, based on the design of Destination Sequenced Distance Vector routing protocol (DSDV). SEAD provides a robust protocol against attackers trying to create incorrect routing state in the other node. However, the computational cost creating and evaluating hash chain increases if number of hops in routing path increased. In this paper, we propose Secure Efficient Ad hoc Distance Vector with fixed hash chain length in short SEAD-FHC protocol to minimize and stabilize the computational complexity that leads minimization in delay time and maximization in throughput. A series of simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance