Security Analysis of Multicast/Unicast Router Key Management Protocols

Key Management Protocols (KMPs) are intended to manage cryptographic keys in a cryptosystem. KMPs have been standardized for Internet Protocol Security (IPsec), and these KMPs have been formally validated for their security properties. In the Internet, routing protocols have different requirements on their KMPs, which are not met by the existing IPsec KMPs, such as IKE, IKEv2, and GDOI. Protocol modeling has been used to analyze the security of the IPsec KMPs. For routing protocols, there are new KMPs proposed by the Keying and Authentication for Routing Protocols (KARP) working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force: RKMP, MRKM, and MaRK. These KMPs are designed to have better applicability for general routing protocols. However, the security of these protocols has not been validated. In this thesis, we have summarized the necessary conditions for security of routing protocols. We have analyzed the security aspects of RKMP, MRKM, and MaRK, by formally validating those protocols using the AVISPA modeling tool. This has shown that these KMPs meet the necessary security requirements

A Security Framework for Routing Protocols

With the rise in internet traffic surveillance and monitoring activities, the routing infrastructure has become an obvious target of attack as compromised routers can be used to stage large scale attacks. Routing protocols are also subjected to various threats such as capture and replay of packets that disclose the network information, forged routing control messages that may compromise a connection by deception, disruption of an on-going connection causing DoS attacks and spreading of unauthentic routing information in the network. Presently, strong cryptographic suites and key management mechanisms (IPsec and IKE) are available to secure host-to-host data communication but none of them focus on securing routing protocols. Today's routing protocols use a shared secret to perform mutual authentication and authorization, and depend on manual keying methods. For message integrity, they either rely on some built-in or external security feature that uses the same shared secret. The KARP working group of the IETF identified that the work is required to tighten the security of the routing protocols and demonstrated that automated key management solutions are needed for increasing security. Towards this goal we propose the RPsec framework. RPsec provides a common baseline for development of KMPs for the routing protocols, supports both automated and manual key management, and overcomes the weakness of existing manual key methods

Design and Validation of Automated Authentication, Key and Adjacency Management for Routing Protocols

To build secure network-based systems, it is important to ensure the authenticity and integrity of the inter-router control message exchanges. Authenticating neighbors and ensuring their legitimacy is essential. Otherwise, the routes installed could be erroneous or targeted at causing an attack on the system. Current methods, which are based on manual keying, are error prone, not scalable, and result in keys being changed infrequently (or not at all) due to lack of authorized personnel. These issues can be addressed only by having an automated key management system that can automatically generate, distribute and update keys. The issue can be cast as a group key management problem with a `keying group' defined as the set of all routers that share the same key. A keying group can be as large as an entire administrative domain, or as small as a pair of peer routers. The smaller the scope of the key the less damaging the loss of a single key is likely to be. In this thesis, we propose an automated key management system that will be able to handle different categories of keying groups and also ensure important properties such as adjacency management, protection against replay attacks, confidentiality of messages, smooth key rollover, and robustness across reboots. Although there is some ongoing work with regard to developing automated key management systems, none of the existing methods handles all these cases. We have formally validated the protocol designed, for essential security properties such as authentication, confidentiality, integrity and replay protection, using a formal validation tool called AVISPA

Group Key Management in Wireless Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networks

A growing number of secure group applications in both civilian and military domains is being deployed in WAHNs. A Wireless Ad-hoc Network (WARN) is a collection of autonomous nodes or terminals that communicate with each other by forming a multi-hop radio network and maintaining connectivity in a decentralized manner. A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a special type of WARN with mobile users. MANET nodes have limited communication, computational capabilities, and power. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are sensor networks with massive numbers of small, inexpensive devices pervasive throughout electrical and mechanical systems and ubiquitous throughout the environment that monitor and control most aspects of our physical world. In a WAHNs and WSNs with un-trusted nodes, nodes may falsify information, collude to disclose system keys, or even passively refuse to collaborate. Moreover, mobile adversaries might invade more than one node and try to reveal all system secret keys. Due to these special characteristics, key management is essential in securing such networks. Current protocols for secure group communications used in fixed networks tend to be inappropriate. The main objective of this research is to propose, design and evaluate a suitable key management approach for secure group communications to support WAHNs and WSNs applications. Key management is usually divided into key analysis, key assignment, key generation and key distribution. In this thesis, we tried to introduce key management schemes to provide secure group communications in both WAHNs and WSNs. Starting with WAHNs, we developed a key management scheme. A novel architecture for secure group communications was proposed. Our proposed scheme handles key distribution through Combinatorial Key Distribution Scheme (CKDS). We followed with key generation using Threshold-based Key Generation in WAHNs (TKGS). For key assignment, we proposed Combinatorial Key Assignment Scheme (CKAS), which assigns closer key strings to co-located nodes. We claim that our architecture can readily be populated with components to support objectives such as fault tolerance, full-distribution and scalability to mitigate WAHNs constraints. In our architecture, group management is integrated with multicast at the application layer. For key management in WSNs, we started with DCK, a modified scheme suitable for WSNs. In summary, the DCK achieves the following: (1) cluster leader nodes carry the major part of the key management overhead; (2) DCK consumes less than 50% of the energy consumed by SHELL in key management; (3) localizing key refreshment and handling node capture enhances the security by minimizing the amount of information known by each node about other portions of the network; and (4) since DCK does not involve the use of other clusters to maintain local cluster data, it scales better from a storage point of view with the network size represented by the number of clusters. We went further and proposed the use of key polynomials with DCK to enhance the resilience of multiple node capturing. Comparing our schemes to static and dynamic key management, our scheme was found to enhance network resilience at a smaller polynomial degree t and accordingly with less storage per node

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

Routing Security Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks: Attacks and Defenses

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are rapidly emerging as an important new area in wireless and mobile computing research. Applications of WSNs are numerous and growing, and range from indoor deployment scenarios in the home and office to outdoor deployment scenarios in adversary's territory in a tactical battleground (Akyildiz et al., 2002). For military environment, dispersal of WSNs into an adversary's territory enables the detection and tracking of enemy soldiers and vehicles. For home/office environments, indoor sensor networks offer the ability to monitor the health of the elderly and to detect intruders via a wireless home security system. In each of these scenarios, lives and livelihoods may depend on the timeliness and correctness of the sensor data obtained from dispersed sensor nodes. As a result, such WSNs must be secured to prevent an intruder from obstructing the delivery of correct sensor data and from forging sensor data. To address the latter problem, end-to-end data integrity checksums and post-processing of senor data can be used to identify forged sensor data (Estrin et al., 1999; Hu et al., 2003a; Ye et al., 2004). The focus of this chapter is on routing security in WSNs. Most of the currently existing routing protocols for WSNs make an optimization on the limited capabilities of the nodes and the application-specific nature of the network, but do not any the security aspects of the protocols. Although these protocols have not been designed with security as a goal, it is extremely important to analyze their security properties. When the defender has the liabilities of insecure wireless communication, limited node capabilities, and possible insider threats, and the adversaries can use powerful laptops with high energy and long range communication to attack the network, designing a secure routing protocol for WSNs is obviously a non-trivial task.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables 4. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1011.152

A pragmatic approach: Achieving acceptable security mechanisms for high speed data transfer protocol-UDT

The development of next generation protocols, such as UDT (UDP-based data transfer), promptly addresses various infrastructure requirements for transmitting data in high speed networks. However, this development creates new vulnerabilities when these protocols are designed to solely rely on existing security solutions of existing protocols such as TCP and UDP. It is clear that not all security protocols (such as TLS) can be used to protect UDT, just as security solutions devised for wired networks cannot be used to protect the unwired ones. The development of UDT, similarly in the development of TCP/UDP many years ago, lacked a well-thought security architecture to address the problems that networks are presently experiencing. This paper proposes and analyses practical security mechanisms for UDT