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

nMIBAS: A Novel Multi-Receiver ID-Based Anonymous Signcryption with Decryption Fairness

Based on the ring signature technology, the multi-receiver ID-based anonymous signcryption (MIBAS) is proposed, and its goal is to protect the privacy of the sender or so-called signer. In an MIBAS scheme, every receiver can verify whether the sender is a member of a trusted group and thus ensure the reliability of the message source, but he could not get the real sender. However, MIBAS paid no attention to privacy of the receivers and has not taken the privacy of the receivers into account during its design. Our analyses show that there widely exist the receiver privacy exposure and decryption unfairness problems in the existing multi-receiver ID-based signcryption schemes. Motivated by these concerns, a new multi-receiver ID-based anonymous signcryption (nMIBAS) is proposed to protect the identity of the receivers. The nMIBAS scheme can not only solve the problem that the existing schemes cannot protect the privacy of receivers, but also meet the fairness of decryption to prevent the possible cheating behavior of the sender effectively. Analysis shows that this scheme is a secure and effective signcryption scheme

A Secure Fog-based Platform for SCADA-based IoT Critical Infrastructure

The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as smart meters and water valves, into industrial critical infrastructures and control systems has put stringent performance and scalability requirements on modern Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. While cloud computing has enabled modern SCADA systems to cope with the increasing amount of data generated by sensors, actuators and control devices, there has been a growing interest recently to deploy edge datacenters in fog architectures to secure low-latency and enhanced security for mission-critical data. However, fog security and privacy for SCADA-based IoT critical infrastructures remains an under-researched area. To address this challenge, this contribution proposes a novel security “toolbox” to reinforce the integrity, security, and privacy of SCADA-based IoTcritical infrastructure at the fog layer. The toolbox incorporates a key feature: a cryptographic-based access approach to the cloud services using identity-based cryptography and signature schemes at the fog layer. We present the implementation details of a prototype for our proposed Secure Fog-based Platform (SeFoP) and provide performance evaluation results to demonstrate the appropriateness of the proposed platform in a real-world scenario. These results can pave the way towards the development of more secured and trusted SCADA-based IoT critical infrastructure, which is essential to counter cyber threats against next-generation critical infrastructure and industrial control systems. The results from the experiments demonstrate a superior performance of SeFoP, which is around 2.8 seconds when adding 5 virtual machines (VMs), 3.2 seconds when adding 10 VMs, and 112 seconds when adding 1000 VMs compared to Multi-Level user Access Control (MLAC) platform

A Review on Data Storage Security in Cloud Computing Environment for Mobile devices

Cloud computing is a platform which provides different capabilities which are not just limited to storage, networking and computing capability as a service to users through Internet. Users can automatically request and release these resources on demand, by paying charges for the quantity and quality of service they use. Cloud computing for Mobile which is also referred as Mobile Cloud Computing is combination of mobile with cloud computing that provides user with unlimited access to the pool of different resources from cloud without affecting mobilization of user with his Mobile. As with its advantages it comes with the risk of data read by the cloud service provider or been grabbed by someone else using man-in-middle attack, thus affecting user privacy and integrity and losing users trust further over the service. These issues can be solved by implementing different techniques like encryption, avoiding unauthorized access to user to have access to stored data. Any algorithm or technique used for securing data should consider few important points like Mobile devices are battery powered and have less processing capability and have less storage space. In this paper we reviewed different techniques for secure storage of user’s data in the cloud, their advantages and disadvantages for mobile cloud computing environment. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.150514

Biometric Cryptosystems : Authentication, Encryption and Signature for Biometric Identities

Biometrics have been used for secure identification and authentication for more than two decades since biometric data is unique, non-transferable, unforgettable, and always with us. Recently, biometrics has pervaded other aspects of security applications that can be listed under the topic of ``Biometric Cryptosystems''. Although the security of some of these systems is questionable when they are utilized alone, integration with other technologies such as digital signatures or Identity Based Encryption (IBE) schemes results in cryptographically secure applications of biometrics. It is exactly this field of biometric cryptosystems that we focused in this thesis. In particular, our goal is to design cryptographic protocols for biometrics in the framework of a realistic security model with a security reduction. Our protocols are designed for biometric based encryption, signature and remote authentication. We first analyze the recently introduced biometric remote authentication schemes designed according to the security model of Bringer et al.. In this model, we show that one can improve the database storage cost significantly by designing a new architecture, which is a two-factor authentication protocol. This construction is also secure against the new attacks we present, which disprove the claimed security of remote authentication schemes, in particular the ones requiring a secure sketch. Thus, we introduce a new notion called ``Weak-identity Privacy'' and propose a new construction by combining cancelable biometrics and distributed remote authentication in order to obtain a highly secure biometric authentication system. We continue our research on biometric remote authentication by analyzing the security issues of multi-factor biometric authentication (MFBA). We formally describe the security model for MFBA that captures simultaneous attacks against these systems and define the notion of user privacy, where the goal of the adversary is to impersonate a client to the server. We design a new protocol by combining bipartite biotokens, homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs and provide a security reduction to achieve user privacy. The main difference of this MFBA protocol is that the server-side computations are performed in the encrypted domain but without requiring a decryption key for the authentication decision of the server. Thus, leakage of the secret key of any system component does not affect the security of the scheme as opposed to the current biometric systems involving cryptographic techniques. We also show that there is a tradeoff between the security level the scheme achieves and the requirement for making the authentication decision without using any secret key. In the second part of the thesis, we delve into biometric-based signature and encryption schemes. We start by designing a new biometric IBS system that is based on the currently most efficient pairing based signature scheme in the literature. We prove the security of our new scheme in the framework of a stronger model compared to existing adversarial models for fuzzy IBS, which basically simulates the leakage of partial secret key components of the challenge identity. In accordance with the novel features of this scheme, we describe a new biometric IBE system called as BIO-IBE. BIO-IBE differs from the current fuzzy systems with its key generation method that not only allows for a larger set of encryption systems to function for biometric identities, but also provides a better accuracy/identification of the users in the system. In this context, BIO-IBE is the first scheme that allows for the use of multi-modal biometrics to avoid collision attacks. Finally, BIO-IBE outperforms the current schemes and for small-universe of attributes, it is secure in the standard model with a better efficiency compared to its counterpart. Another contribution of this thesis is the design of biometric IBE systems without using pairings. In fact, current fuzzy IBE schemes are secure under (stronger) bilinear assumptions and the decryption of each message requires pairing computations almost equal to the number of attributes defining the user. Thus, fuzzy IBE makes error-tolerant encryption possible at the expense of efficiency and security. Hence, we design a completely new construction for biometric IBE based on error-correcting codes, generic conversion schemes and weakly secure anonymous IBE schemes that encrypt a message bit by bit. The resulting scheme is anonymous, highly secure and more efficient compared to pairing-based biometric IBE, especially for the decryption phase. The security of our generic construction is reduced to the security of the anonymous IBE scheme, which is based on the Quadratic Residuosity assumption. The binding of biometric features to the user's identity is achieved similar to BIO-IBE, thus, preserving the advantages of its key generation procedure

Efficient identity based signcryption scheme and solution of key-escrow problem

In cryptography for sending any information from sender to receiver, we have to ensure about the three types of security policies i.e. integrity, confidentiality and authentication. For confidentiality purpose, encryption-decryption technique is used and for authentication purpose digital signature is used, so to ensure this three properties, first sender encrypt the message and then sign the message. Same process done at the receiver end that means first message is decrypted then verified, so it's two step process that increases the communication as well as computation cost. But in many real life applications where more speed and less cost is required like e-commerce applications, we can't use signature then encryption technique, so signcryption is the cryptographic primitives that provides signature as well as encryption at the same time on a single step. First signcryption scheme is proposed by Yullian Zheng in 1997, Since then many signcryption scheme is proposed based on elliptic discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) , Bilinear pairing, Identity Based and certificateless environment. Many of the Signcryption scheme used Random Oracle Model for their security proofs and few are based on standard model