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

DSSAM: digitally signed secure acknowledgement method for mobile ad hoc network

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an infrastructure-less, self-motivated, arbitrary, self-configuring, rapidly changing, multi-hop network that is self-possessing wireless bandwidth-conscious links without centrally managed router support. In such a network, wireless media is easy to snoop. It is firm to the surety to access any node, easier to insertion of bad elements or attackers for malicious activities in the network. Therefore, security issues become one of the significant considerations for such kind of networks. The deployment of an effective intrusion detection system is important in order to provide protection against various attacks. In this paper, a Digitally Signed Secure Acknowledgement Method (DSSAM) with the use of the RSA digital signature has been proposed and simulated. Three different parameters are considered, namely secure acknowledgment, node authentication, and packet authentication for study. This article observes the DSSAM performance and compares it with two existing standard methods, namely Watchdog and 2-ACK under standard Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) routing environment. In the end, it is noticed that the rate of detection of malicious behaviour is better in the case of the proposed method. However, associated overheads are high. A trade-of between performance and overhead has been considered

A Comprehensive Survey on Routing and Security in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

With the continuous advances in mobile wirelesssensor networks (MWSNs), the research community hasresponded to the challenges and constraints in the design of thesenetworks by proposing efficient routing protocols that focus onparticular performance metrics such as residual energy utilization,mobility, topology, scalability, localization, data collection routing,Quality of Service (QoS), etc. In addition, the introduction ofmobility in WSN has brought new challenges for the routing,stability, security, and reliability of WSNs. Therefore, in thisarticle, we present a comprehensive and meticulous investigationin the routing protocols and security challenges in the theory ofMWSNs which was developed in recent years

Securing routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is more prone to security threats than other wired and wireless networks because of the distributed nature of the network. Conventional MANET routing protocols assume that all nodes cooperate without maliciously disrupting the operation of the protocol and do not provide defence against attackers. Blackhole and flooding attacks have a dramatic negative impact while grayhole and selfish attacks have a little negative impact on the performance of MANET routing protocols. Malicious nodes or misbehaviour actions detection in the network is an important task to maintain the proper routing protocol operation. Current solutions cannot guarantee the true classification of nodes because the cooperative nature of the MANETs which leads to false exclusions of innocent nodes and/or good classification of malicious nodes. The thesis introduces a new concept of Self- Protocol Trustiness (SPT) to discover malicious nodes with a very high trustiness ratio of a node classification. Designing and implementing new mechanisms that can resist flooding and blackhole attacks which have high negative impacts on the performance of these reactive protocols is the main objective of the thesis. The design of these mechanisms is based on SPT concept to ensure the high trustiness ratio of node classification. In addition, they neither incorporate the use of cryptographic algorithms nor depend on routing packet formats which make these solutions robust and reliable, and simplify their implementations in different MANET reactive protocols. Anti-Flooding (AF) mechanism is designed to resist flooding attacks which relies on locally applied timers and thresholds to classify nodes as malicious. Although AF mechanism succeeded in discovering malicious nodes within a small time, it has a number of thresholds that enable attacker to subvert the algorithm and cannot guarantee that the excluded nodes are genuine malicious nodes which was the motivation to develop this algorithm. On the other hand, Flooding Attack Resisting Mechanism (FARM) is designed to close the security gaps and overcome the drawbacks of AF mechanism. It succeeded in detecting and excluding more than 80% of flooding nodes within the simulation time with a very high trustiness ratio. Anti-Blackhole (AB) mechanism is designed to resist blackhole attacks and relies on a single threshold. The algorithm guarantees 100% exclusion of blackhole nodes and does not exclude any innocent node that may forward a reply packet. Although AB mechanism succeeded in discovering malicious nodes within a small time, the only suggested threshold enables an attacker to subvert the algorithm which was the motivation to develop it. On the other hand, Blackhole Resisting Mechanism (BRM) has the main advantages of AB mechanism while it is designed to close the security gaps and overcome the drawbacks of AB mechanism. It succeeded in detecting and excluding the vast majority of blackhole nodes within the simulation time

RTDSR protocol for channel attacks prevention in mobile ad hoc ambient intelligence home networks

In ambient intelligence home networks, attacks can be on the home devices or the communication channel. This paper focuses on the channel attacks prevention by proposing Real Time Dynamic Source Routing (RTDSR) protocol. The protocol adopted the observation based cooperation enforcement in ad hoc networks (oceans) and collaborative reputation mechanism built on Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol. The RTDSR introduced lookup table on the source, destination and intermediate nodes. It also ensures that data path with high reputation are used for data routing and a monitoring watchdog was introduced to ensure that the next node forward the packet properly. The RTDSR protocol was simulated and benchmarked with DSR protocol considering network throughput, average delay, routing overhead and response time as performance metrics. Simulation result revealed a better performance of RTDSR protocol over existing DSR protocol.Keywords: RTDSR, Ambient, Home network, Channel attacks, Protocol, Packet, OPNE