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

An Improved Intrusion Prevention Sytem for WLAN

The volatile growth in wireless networks over the last few years resembles the rapid growth of the Internet within the last decade. The current IPS presents a less security. Unfortunately, our work combined with the work of others show that each of these mechanisms are completely futile. As a result, organizations with deployed wireless networks are vulnerable to illegal use of, and access to, their internal communications

Channel Scanning and Access Point Selection Mechanisms for 802.11 Handoff: A Survey

While the cellular technology has been evolving continuously in recent years and client handoffs remain unnoticed, the 802.11 networks still impose an enormous latency issue once the client device decides to roam between the Access Point (AP). This latency is caused by many factors reckoning on scanning the channels and searching for APs with better signal strength. Once data from all the nearby APs has been collected, the client picks the most suitable AP and tries to connect with it. The AP verifies if it has enough capability to serve the client. It also ensures that the client has the required parameters and supported rates to match with the AP. The AP then processes this request, generates a new Association ID and sends it back to the client, thereby granting access to connect. Throughout this re-association process, the client fails to receive or send any data frames and experiences a lag between leaving the old and associating with a new AP. Originally, 802.11 authentication frames were designed for Wired Equivalent Privacy protocol, but later it was found to be insecure and thus got depreciated. Keeping these security aspects concerning shared key authentication in mind, few additional drafts were introduced by IEEE that concerned many key exchanges between the devices. IEEE 802.11r was introduced in 2008 that permits wireless clients to perform faster handoff along with additional data security standards. The key exchange method was redefined and also the new security negotiation protocol started serving wireless devices with a better approach. This enables a client to set up the Quality of Service state and security on an alternative AP before making a transition which ends up in minimal connectivity losses. Although this was an excellent step towards minimizing the service disruption and channel scanning, failure to remain connected with consecutive suitable APs within the minimum time continued to be a challenge. Different manufacturers use their custom-built methodology of handling a client handoff and hence the latency costs differ based on the type of handoff scheme deployed on the device. This thesis focuses on the foremost economical researches throughout recent years which targets minimizing the delays involved with channel scanning and AP selection. A wide sort of enhancements, whether it is on a client device or the AP, has been discussed and compared. Some modifications are associated with enhancing channel scan period or using beacons, and probe requests/responses in an efficient manner. Others concentrate on modifying the device hardware configuration and switching between Network Interfaces. Central controllers are a solution to handoff delays that may track the status of each device within the network and guide them to provide the appropriate Quality of Service to the end-users

Cooperative communication in wireless networks: algorithms, protocols and systems

Current wireless network solutions are based on a link abstraction where a single co-channel transmitter transmits in any time duration. This model severely limits the performance that can be obtained from the network. Being inherently an extension of a wired network model, this model is also incapable of handling the unique challenges that arise in a wireless medium. The prevailing theme of this research is to explore wireless link abstractions that incorporate the broadcast and space-time varying nature of the wireless channel. Recently, a new paradigm for wireless networks which uses the idea of 'cooperative transmissions' (CT) has garnered significant attention. Unlike current approaches where a single transmitter transmits at a time in any channel, with CT, multiple transmitters transmit concurrently after appropriately encoding their transmissions. While the physical layer mechanisms for CT have been well studied, the higher layer applicability of CT has been relatively unexplored. In this work, we show that when wireless links use CT, several network performance metrics such as aggregate throughput, security and spatial reuse can be improved significantly compared to the current state of the art. In this context, our first contribution is Aegis, a framework for securing wireless networks against eavesdropping which uses CT with intelligent scheduling and coding in Wireless Local Area networks. The second contribution is Symbiotic Coding, an approach to encode information such that successful reception is possible even upon collisions. The third contribution is Proteus, a routing protocol that improves aggregate throughput in multi-hop networks by leveraging CT to adapt the rate and range of links in a flow. Finally, we also explore the practical aspects of realizing CT using real systems.PhDCommittee Chair: Sivakumar, Raghupathy; Committee Member: Ammar, Mostafa; Committee Member: Ingram, Mary Ann; Committee Member: Jayant, Nikil; Committee Member: Riley, Georg

Design And Hardware Implementation Of A Novel Scrambling Security Algorithm For Robust Wireless Local Area Networks

The IEEE802.11 standard for wireless networks includes a Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol, which is a popular wireless secure communication stream cipher protocol approach to network security used to protect link-layer communications from eavesdropping and other attacks. It allows user to communicate with the user; sharing the public key over a network. It provides authentication and encrypted communications over unsecured channels. However, WEP protocol has an inherent security flaw. It is vulnerable to the various attacks, various experiments has proved that WEP fails to achieve its security goals. This thesis entails designing, evaluating and prototyping a wireless security infrastructure that can be used with the WEP protocol optionally, thus reducing the security vulnerabilities. We have studied the flaws of WEP and the reasons for their occurrence, and we provide the design and implementation of a novel scheme in Matlab and VHDL to improve the security of WEP in all aspects by a degree of 1000. The architecture was designed with a consideration for least increment in hardware, thus achieving power and cost efficiency. It also provides flexibility for optional implementation with the available technology by being able to be bypassed by the technology, which allows for non-replacement of existing hardware, common on both, the WEP and the proposed protocols, on the fly

Analysis of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) Technology for an Indoor Geolocation and Physiological Monitoring System

The goal of this research is to analyze the utility of UWB for indoor geolocation and to evaluate a prototype system, which will send information detailing a person’s position and physiological status to a command center. In a real world environment, geolocation and physiological status information needs to be sent to a command and control center that may be located several miles away from the operational environment. This research analyzes and characterizes the UWB signal in the various operational environments associated with indoor geolocation. Additionally, typical usage scenarios for the interaction between UWB and other devices are also tested and evaluated

Frequency hopping in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are nowadays being used to collectively gather and spread information in different kinds of applications, for military, civilian, environmental as well as commercial purposes. Therefore the proper functioning of WSNs under different kinds of environmental conditions, especially hostile environments, is a must and a lot of research currently ongoing. The problems related to the initialization and deployment of WSNs under harsh and resource limited conditions are investigated in this thesis. Frequency hopping (FH) is a spread spectrum technique in which multiple channels are used, or hoped, for communications across the network. This mitigates the worst effects of interference with frequency agile communication systems rather than by brute force approaches. FH is a promising technique for achieving the coexistence of sensor networks with other currently existing wireless systems, and it is successful within the somewhat limited computational capabilities of the sensor nodes hardware radios. In this thesis, a FH scheme for WSNs is implemented for a pair of nodes on an application layer. The merits and demerits of the scheme are studied for different kinds of WSN environments. The implementation has been done using a Sensinode NanoStack, a communication stack for internet protocol (IP) based wireless sensor networks and a Sensinode Devkit, for an IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN). The measurements are taken from the developed test bed and channel simulator for different kinds of scenarios. The detailed analysis of the FH scheme is done to determine its usefulness against interference from other wireless systems, especially wireless local area networks (WLANs), and the robustness of the scheme to combat fading or frequency selective fading

Goodbye, ALOHA!

©2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) to interconnect and Internet-connect everyday people, objects, and machines poses new challenges in the design of wireless communication networks. The design of medium access control (MAC) protocols has been traditionally an intense area of research due to their high impact on the overall performance of wireless communications. The majority of research activities in this field deal with different variations of protocols somehow based on ALOHA, either with or without listen before talk, i.e., carrier sensing multiple access. These protocols operate well under low traffic loads and low number of simultaneous devices. However, they suffer from congestion as the traffic load and the number of devices increase. For this reason, unless revisited, the MAC layer can become a bottleneck for the success of the IoT. In this paper, we provide an overview of the existing MAC solutions for the IoT, describing current limitations and envisioned challenges for the near future. Motivated by those, we identify a family of simple algorithms based on distributed queueing (DQ), which can operate for an infinite number of devices generating any traffic load and pattern. A description of the DQ mechanism is provided and most relevant existing studies of DQ applied in different scenarios are described in this paper. In addition, we provide a novel performance evaluation of DQ when applied for the IoT. Finally, a description of the very first demo of DQ for its use in the IoT is also included in this paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft