A two‐step authentication framework for Mobile ad hoc networks

The lack of fixed infrastructure in ad hoc networks causes nodes to rely more heavily on peer nodes for communication. Nevertheless, establishing trust in such a distributed environment is very difficult, since it is not straightforward for a node to determine if its peer nodes can be trusted. An additional concern in such an environment is with whether a peer node is merely relaying a message or if it is the originator of the message. In this paper, we propose an authentication approach for protecting nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. The security requirements for protecting data link and network layers are identified and the design criteria for creating secure ad hoc networks using several authentication protocols are analyzed. Protocols based on zero knowledge and challenge response techniques are presented and their performance is evaluated through analysis and simulation

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

Using Auto-Ordering to Improve Object Transfer between Mobile Devices

People frequently form small groups in many social and professional situations: from conference attendees meeting at a coffee break, to siblings gathering at a family barbecue. These ad-hoc gatherings typically form into predictable geometries based on circles or circular arcs (called F-Formations). Because our lives are increasingly stored and represented by data on handheld devices, the desire to be able to share digital objects while in these groupings has increased. Using the relative position in these groups to facilitate file sharing could facilitate intuitive interfaces such as passing or flicking. However, there is no reliable, lightweight, ad-hoc technology for detecting and representing relative locations around a circle. In this thesis, we present three systems that can auto-order locations about a circle based on sensors standard on commodity smartphones. We tested two of these systems using an object passing task in a laboratory environment against unordered and proximity-based systems, and show that our techniques are faster, more accurate, and preferred by users

A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

ChirpOTLE: A Framework for Practical LoRaWAN Security Evaluation

Low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) are becoming an integral part of the Internet of Things. As a consequence, businesses, administration, and, subsequently, society itself depend on the reliability and availability of these communication networks. Released in 2015, LoRaWAN gained popularity and attracted the focus of security research, revealing a number of vulnerabilities. This lead to the revised LoRaWAN 1.1 specification in late 2017. Most of previous work focused on simulation and theoretical approaches. Interoperability and the variety of implementations complicate the risk assessment for a specific LoRaWAN network. In this paper, we address these issues by introducing ChirpOTLE, a LoRa and LoRaWAN security evaluation framework suitable for rapid iteration and testing of attacks in testbeds and assessing the security of real-world networks.We demonstrate the potential of our framework by verifying the applicability of a novel denial-of-service attack targeting the adaptive data rate mechanism in a testbed using common off-the-shelf hardware. Furthermore, we show the feasibility of the Class B beacon spoofing attack, which has not been demonstrated in practice before.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figures, accepted at ACM WiSec 2020 (13th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks