A Study on Techniques/Algorithms used for Detection and Prevention of Security Attacks in Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper a detailed survey is carried out on the taxonomy of Security Issues, Advances on Security Threats and Countermeasures ,A Cross-Layer Attack, Security Status and Challenges for Cognitive Radio Networks, also a detailed survey on several Algorithms/Techniques used to detect and prevent SSDF(Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification) attack a type of DOS (Denial of Service) attack and several other  Network layer attacks in Cognitive Radio Network or Cognitive Radio Wireless Sensor Node Networks(WSNN’s) to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of those existing algorithms/techniques

Ensuring Cyber-Security in Smart Railway Surveillance with SHIELD

Modern railways feature increasingly complex embedded computing systems for surveillance, that are moving towards fully wireless smart-sensors. Those systems are aimed at monitoring system status from a physical-security viewpoint, in order to detect intrusions and other environmental anomalies. However, the same systems used for physical-security surveillance are vulnerable to cyber-security threats, since they feature distributed hardware and software architectures often interconnected by ‘open networks’, like wireless channels and the Internet. In this paper, we show how the integrated approach to Security, Privacy and Dependability (SPD) in embedded systems provided by the SHIELD framework (developed within the EU funded pSHIELD and nSHIELD research projects) can be applied to railway surveillance systems in order to measure and improve their SPD level. SHIELD implements a layered architecture (node, network, middleware and overlay) and orchestrates SPD mechanisms based on ontology models, appropriate metrics and composability. The results of prototypical application to a real-world demonstrator show the effectiveness of SHIELD and justify its practical applicability in industrial settings

A reliable trust-aware reinforcement learning based routing protocol for wireless medical sensor networks.

Interest in the Wireless Medical Sensor Network (WMSN) is rapidly gaining attention thanks to recent advances in semiconductors and wireless communication. However, by virtue of the sensitive medical applications and the stringent resource constraints, there is a need to develop a routing protocol to fulfill WMSN requirements in terms of delivery reliability, attack resiliency, computational overhead and energy efficiency. This doctoral research therefore aims to advance the state of the art in routing by proposing a lightweight, reliable routing protocol for WMSN. Ensuring a reliable path between the source and the destination requires making trustaware routing decisions to avoid untrustworthy paths. A lightweight and effective Trust Management System (TMS) has been developed to evaluate the trust relationship between the sensor nodes with a view to differentiating between trustworthy nodes and untrustworthy ones. Moreover, a resource-conservative Reinforcement Learning (RL) model has been proposed to reduce the computational overhead, along with two updating methods to speed up the algorithm convergence. The reward function is re-defined as a punishment, combining the proposed trust management system to defend against well-known dropping attacks. Furthermore, with a view to addressing the inborn overestimation problem in Q-learning-based routing protocols, we adopted double Q-learning to overcome the positive bias of using a single estimator. An energy model is integrated with the reward function to enhance the network lifetime and balance energy consumption across the network. The proposed energy model uses only local information to avoid the resource burdens and the security concerns of exchanging energy information. Finally, a realistic trust management testbed has been developed to overcome the limitations of using numerical analysis to evaluate proposed trust management schemes, particularly in the context of WMSN. The proposed testbed has been developed as an additional module to the NS-3 simulator to fulfill usability, generalisability, flexibility, scalability and high-performance requirements

Simulation of attacks for security in wireless sensor network

The increasing complexity and low-power constraints of current Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) require efficient methodologies for network simulation and embedded software performance analysis of nodes. In addition, security is also a very important feature that has to be addressed in most WSNs, since they may work with sensitive data and operate in hostile unattended environments. In this paper, a methodology for security analysis of Wireless Sensor Networks is presented. The methodology allows designing attack-aware embedded software/firmware or attack countermeasures to provide security in WSNs. The proposed methodology includes attacker modeling and attack simulation with performance analysis (node?s software execution time and power consumption estimation). After an analysis of different WSN attack types, an attacker model is proposed. This model defines three different types of attackers that can emulate most WSN attacks. In addition, this paper presents a virtual platform that is able to model the node hardware, embedded software and basic wireless channel features. This virtual simulation analyzes the embedded software behavior and node power consumption while it takes into account the network deployment and topology. Additionally, this simulator integrates the previously mentioned attacker model. Thus, the impact of attacks on power consumption and software behavior/execution-time can be analyzed. This provides developers with essential information about the effects that one or multiple attacks could have on the network, helping them to develop more secure WSN systems. This WSN attack simulator is an essential element of the attack-aware embedded software development methodology that is also introduced in this work.This work has been funded by the Spanish MICINN under the TEC2011-28666-C04-02 and TEC2014-58036-C4-3-R project

Intrusion Detection System for detecting internal threats in 6LoWPAN

6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Network) is a standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force group to enable the Wireless Sensor Networks to connect to the IPv6 Internet. This standard is rapidly gaining popularity for its applicability, ranging extensively from health care to environmental monitoring. Security is one of the most crucial issues that need to be considered properly in 6LoWPAN. Common 6LoWPAN security threats can come from external or internal attackers. Cryptographic techniques are helpful in protecting the external attackers from illegally joining the network. However, because the network devices are commonly not tampered-proof, the attackers can break the cryptography codes of such devices and use them to operate like an internal source. These malicious sources can create internal attacks, which may downgrade significantly network performance. Protecting the network from these internal threats has therefore become one of the centre security problems on 6LoWPAN. This thesis investigates the security issues created by the internal threats in 6LoWPAN and proposes the use of Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to deal with such threats. Our main works are to categorise the 6LoWPAN threats into two major types, and to develop two different IDSs to detect each of this type effectively. The major contributions of this thesis are summarised as below. First, we categorise the 6LoWPAN internal threats into two main types, one that focuses on compromising directly the network performance (performance-type) and the other is to manipulate the optimal topology (topology-type), to later downgrade the network service quality indirectly. In each type, we select some typical threats to implement, and assess their particular impacts on network performance as well as identify performance metrics that are sensitive in the attacked situations, in order to form the basis detection knowledge. In addition, on studying the topology-type, we propose several novel attacks towards the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy network (RPL - the underlying routing protocol in 6LoWPAN), including the Rank attack, Local Repair attack and DIS attack. Second, we develop a Bayesian-based IDS to detect the performance-type internal threats by monitoring typical attacking targets such as traffic, channel or neighbour nodes. Unlike other statistical approaches, which have a limited view by just using a single metric to monitor a specific attack, our Bayesian-based IDS can judge an abnormal behaviour with a wiser view by considering of different metrics using the insightful understanding of their relations. Such wiser view helps to increase the IDS’s accuracy significantly. Third, we develop a Specification-based IDS module to detect the topology-type internal threats based on profiling the RPL operation. In detail, we generalise the observed states and transitions of RPL control messages to construct a high-level abstract of node operations through analysing the trace files of the simulations. Our profiling technique can form all of the protocol’s legal states and transitions automatically with corresponding statistic data, which is faster and easier to verify compare with other manual specification techniques. This IDS module can detect the topology-type threats quickly with a low rate of false detection. We also propose a monitoring architecture that uses techniques from modern technologies such as LTE (Long-term Evolution), cloud computing, and multiple interface sensor devices, to expand significantly the capability of the IDS in 6LoWPAN. This architecture can enable the running of both two proposed IDSs without much overhead created, to help the system to deal with most of the typical 6LoWPAN internal threats. Overall, the simulation results in Contiki Cooja prove that our two IDS modules are effective in detecting the 6LoWPAN internal threats, with the detection accuracy is ranging between 86 to 100% depends on the types of attacks, while the False Positive is also satisfactory, with under 5% for most of the attacks. We also show that the additional energy consumptions and the overhead of the solutions are at an acceptable level to be used in the 6LoWPAN environment

Machine learning and blockchain technologies for cybersecurity in connected vehicles

Future connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) must be secured againstcyberattacks for their everyday functions on the road so that safety of passengersand vehicles can be ensured. This article presents a holistic review of cybersecurityattacks on sensors and threats regardingmulti-modal sensor fusion. A compre-hensive review of cyberattacks on intra-vehicle and inter-vehicle communicationsis presented afterward. Besides the analysis of conventional cybersecurity threatsand countermeasures for CAV systems,a detailed review of modern machinelearning, federated learning, and blockchain approach is also conducted to safe-guard CAVs. Machine learning and data mining-aided intrusion detection systemsand other countermeasures dealing with these challenges are elaborated at theend of the related section. In the last section, research challenges and future direc-tions are identified