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

Secure key design approaches using entropy harvesting in wireless sensor network: A survey

Physical layer based security design in wireless sensor networks have gained much importance since the past decade. The various constraints associated with such networks coupled with other factors such as their deployment mainly in remote areas, nature of communication etc. are responsible for development of research works where the focus is secured key generation, extraction, and sharing. Keeping the importance of such works in mind, this survey is undertaken that provides a vivid description of the different mechanisms adopted for securely generating the key as well its randomness extraction and also sharing. This survey work not only concentrates on the more common methods, like received signal strength based but also goes on to describe other uncommon strategies such as accelerometer based. We first discuss the three fundamental steps viz. randomness extraction, key generation and sharing and their importance in physical layer based security design. We then review existing secure key generation, extraction, and sharing mechanisms and also discuss their pros and cons. In addition, we present a comprehensive comparative study of the recent advancements in secure key generation, sharing, and randomness extraction approaches on the basis of adversary, secret bit generation rate, energy efficiency etc. Finally, the survey wraps up with some promising future research directions in this area

IEEE 802.11n MAC frame aggregation mechanisms for next-generation high-throughput WLANs [Medium access control protocols for wireless LANs]

IEEE 802.11n is an ongoing next-generation wireless LAN standard that supports a very highspeed connection with more than 100 Mb/s data throughput measured at the medium access control layer. This article investigates the key MAC enhancements that help 802.11n achieve high throughput and high efficiency. A detailed description is given for various frame aggregation mechanisms proposed in the latest 802.11n draft standard. Our simulation results confirm that A-MSDU, A-MPDU, and a combination of these methods improve extensively the channel efficiency and data throughput. We analyze the performance of each frame aggregation scheme in distinct scenarios, and we conclude that overall, the two-level aggregation is the most efficacious