1,329 research outputs found
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
Improving Air Interface User Privacy in Mobile Telephony
Although the security properties of 3G and 4G mobile networks have
significantly improved by comparison with 2G (GSM), significant shortcomings
remain with respect to user privacy. A number of possible modifications to 2G,
3G and 4G protocols have been proposed designed to provide greater user
privacy; however, they all require significant modifications to existing
deployed infrastructures, which are almost certainly impractical to achieve in
practice. In this article we propose an approach which does not require any
changes to the existing deployed network infrastructures or mobile devices, but
offers improved user identity protection over the air interface. The proposed
scheme makes use of multiple IMSIs for an individual USIM to offer a degree of
pseudonymity for a user. The only changes required are to the operation of the
authentication centre in the home network and to the USIM, and the scheme could
be deployed immediately since it is completely transparent to the existing
mobile telephony infrastructure. We present two different approaches to the use
and management of multiple IMSIs
Enabling Disaster Resilient 4G Mobile Communication Networks
The 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the cellular technology expected to
outperform the previous generations and to some extent revolutionize the
experience of the users by taking advantage of the most advanced radio access
techniques (i.e. OFDMA, SC-FDMA, MIMO). However, the strong dependencies
between user equipments (UEs), base stations (eNBs) and the Evolved Packet Core
(EPC) limit the flexibility, manageability and resiliency in such networks. In
case the communication links between UEs-eNB or eNB-EPC are disrupted, UEs are
in fact unable to communicate. In this article, we reshape the 4G mobile
network to move towards more virtual and distributed architectures for
improving disaster resilience, drastically reducing the dependency between UEs,
eNBs and EPC. The contribution of this work is twofold. We firstly present the
Flexible Management Entity (FME), a distributed entity which leverages on
virtualized EPC functionalities in 4G cellular systems. Second, we introduce a
simple and novel device-todevice (D2D) communication scheme allowing the UEs in
physical proximity to communicate directly without resorting to the
coordination with an eNB.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magazin
A Survey of Physical Layer Security Techniques for 5G Wireless Networks and Challenges Ahead
Physical layer security which safeguards data confidentiality based on the
information-theoretic approaches has received significant research interest
recently. The key idea behind physical layer security is to utilize the
intrinsic randomness of the transmission channel to guarantee the security in
physical layer. The evolution towards 5G wireless communications poses new
challenges for physical layer security research. This paper provides a latest
survey of the physical layer security research on various promising 5G
technologies, including physical layer security coding, massive multiple-input
multiple-output, millimeter wave communications, heterogeneous networks,
non-orthogonal multiple access, full duplex technology, etc. Technical
challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and
the future trends of physical layer security in 5G and beyond are discussed.Comment: To appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication
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