Data analytics methods for attack detection and localization in wireless networks

Wireless ad hoc network operates without any fixed infrastructure and centralized administration. It is a group of wirelessly connected nodes having the capability to work as host and router. Due to its features of open communication medium, dynamic changing topology, and cooperative algorithm, security is the primary concern when designing wireless networks. Compared to the traditional wired network, a clean division of layers may be sacrificed for performance in wireless ad hoc networks. As a result, they are vulnerable to various types of attacks at different layers of the protocol stack. In this paper, I present real-time series data analysis solutions to detect various attacks including in- band wormholes attack in the network layer, various MAC layer misbehaviors, and jamming attack in the physical layer. And, I also investigate the problem of node localization in wireless and sensor networks, where a total of n anchor nodes are used to determine the locations of other nodes based on the received signal strengths. A range-based machine learning algorithm is developed to tackle the challenges --Abstract, page iii

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

802.11 Fingerprinting to Detect Wireless Stealth Attacks

We propose a simple, passive and deployable approach for fingerprinting traffic on the wired side as a solution for three critical stealth attacks in wireless networks. We focus on extracting traces of the 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol from the temporal arrival patterns of incoming traffic streams as seen on the wired side, to identify attacker behavior. Attacks addressed include unauthorized access points, selfish behavior at the MAC layer and MAC layer covert timing channels. We employ the Bayesian binning technique as a means of classifying between delay distributions. The scheme requires no change to the 802.11 nodes or protocol, exhibits minimal computational overhead and offers a single point of discovery. We evaluate our model using experiments and simulations

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

Secure Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to the service providers. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, with each access point (AP) connected to the wired network, in WMNs only a subset of the APs are required to be connected to the wired network. The APs that are connected to the wired network are called the Internet gateways (IGWs), while the APs that do not have wired connections are called the mesh routers (MRs). The MRs are connected to the IGWs using multi-hop communication. The IGWs provide access to conventional clients and interconnect ad hoc, sensor, cellular, and other networks to the Internet. However, most of the existing routing protocols for WMNs are extensions of protocols originally designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and thus they perform sub-optimally. Moreover, most routing protocols for WMNs are designed without security issues in mind, where the nodes are all assumed to be honest. In practical deployment scenarios, this assumption does not hold. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in WMNs and then particularly focuses on secure routing in these networks. First, it identifies security vulnerabilities in the medium access control (MAC) and the network layers. Various possibilities of compromising data confidentiality, data integrity, replay attacks and offline cryptanalysis are also discussed. Then various types of attacks in the MAC and the network layers are discussed. After enumerating the various types of attacks on the MAC and the network layer, the chapter briefly discusses on some of the preventive mechanisms for these attacks.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures, 5 table

Hardware assisted misbehaving nodes detection in mobile ad hoc networks

The mobility feature leads to the proliferation of wireless networks. Among all kindsof wireless networks, the peer-to-peer nature of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET)makes such networks very promising. Unlike traditional wired networks, MANETs donot need infrastructure to work properly. The most commonly used routing protocols formobile ad hoc networks do not take into consideration security, assuming all the mobilenodes will coordinate with each other. Such routing protocols along with the absence ofinfrastructure make MANETs prone to a variety of faults such as packet dropping, packetmisrouting, etc.This dissertation addresses the security issues of MANET by presenting the hardwareassisted misbehaving nodes detection. In such a scheme, the hardware is responsible fordetecting the misbehaving nodes. The detection results are sent to software layer ofmobile nodes. Upon receiving the detection results, the software layer can exclude themisbehaving nodes from the networks.This dissertation presents two hardware detection schemes. Two-timer is a low-costdetection scheme. There are only two timers utilized in the scheme. The two-timerscheme can be used to detect simple packet dropping with good detection performance.The other detection scheme, cache scheme, can detect both packet dropping and packetmisrouting. The cache scheme needs more resource than the two-timer scheme alongwith better detection performance

Intrusion Detection System for Platooning Connected Autonomous Vehicles

The deployment of Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) requires secure wireless communication in order to ensure reliable connectivity and safety. However, this wireless communication is vulnerable to a variety of cyber atacks such as spoofing or jamming attacks. In this paper, we describe an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) based on Machine Learning (ML) techniques designed to detect both spoofing and jamming attacks in a CAV environment. The IDS would reduce the risk of traffic disruption and accident caused as a result of cyber-attacks. The detection engine of the presented IDS is based on the ML algorithms Random Forest (RF), k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN) and One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM), as well as data fusion techniques in a cross-layer approach. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the proposed IDS is the first in literature that uses a cross-layer approach to detect both spoofing and jamming attacks against the communication of connected vehicles platooning. The evaluation results of the implemented IDS present a high accuracy of over 90% using training datasets containing both known and unknown attacks