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

Development of a Remotely Accessible Wireless Testbed for Performance Evaluation of AMI Related Protocols

Although smart meters are deployed in many countries, the data collection process from smart meters in Smart Grid (SG) still has some challenges related to consumer privacy that needs to be addressed. Referred to as Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), the data collected and transmitted through the AMI can leak sensitive information about the consumers if it is sent as a plaintext. While many solutions have been proposed in the past, the deployment of these solutions in real-life was not possible since the actual AMIs were not accessible to researchers. Therefore, a lot of solutions relied on simulations which may not be able to capture the real performance of these solutions. In this thesis, two 802.11s wireless mesh-based SG AMI network testbeds are developed with Beaglebone Black and Raspberry Pi 3 boards to provide a baseline for the simulations. The Raspberry Pi 3 testbed is also configured to be remotely accessible

Performance Optimization of Network Protocols for IEEE 802.11s-based Smart Grid Communications

The transformation of the legacy electric grid to Smart Grid (SG) poses numerous challenges in the design and development of an efficient SG communications network. While there has been an increasing interest in identifying the SG communications network and possible SG applications, specific research challenges at the network protocol have not been elaborated yet. This dissertation revisited each layer of a TCP/IP protocol stack which basically was designed for a wired network and optimized their performance in IEEE 802.11s-based Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) communications network against the following challenges: security and privacy, AMI data explosion, periodic simultaneous data reporting scheduling, poor Transport Control Protocol (TCP) performance, Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) broadcast, and network interoperability. To address these challenges, layered and/or cross-layered protocol improvements were proposed for each layer of TCP/IP protocol stack. At the application layer, a tree-based periodic time schedule and a time division multiple access-based scheduling were proposed to reduce high contention when smart meters simultaneously send their reading. Homomorphic encryption performance was investigated to handle AMI data explosion while providing security and privacy. At the transport layer, a tree-based fixed Retransmission Timeout (RTO) setting and a path-error aware RTO that exploits rich information of IEEE 802.11s data-link layer path selection were proposed to address higher delay due to TCP mechanisms. At the network layer, ARP requests create broadcast storm problems in IEEE 802.11s due to the use of MAC addresses for routing. A secure piggybacking-based ARP was proposed to eliminate this issue. The tunneling mechanisms in the LTE network cause a downlink traffic problem to IEEE 802.11s. For the network interoperability, at the network layer of EPC network, a novel UE access list was proposed to address this issue. At the data-link layer, to handle QoS mismatch between IEEE 802.11s and LTE network, Dual Queues approach was proposed for the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access. The effectiveness of all proposed approaches was validated through extensive simulation experiments using a network simulator. The simulation results showed that the proposed approaches outperformed the traditional TCP/IP protocols in terms of end to end delay, packet delivery ratio, throughput, and collection time

Smart Grid Metering Networks: A Survey on Security, Privacy and Open Research Issues

Smart grid (SG) networks are newly upgraded networks of connected objects that greatly improve reliability, efficiency and sustainability of the traditional energy infrastructure. In this respect, the smart metering infrastructure (SMI) plays an important role in controlling, monitoring and managing multiple domains in the SG. Despite the salient features of SMI, security and privacy issues have been under debate because of the large number of heterogeneous devices that are anticipated to be coordinated through public communication networks. This survey paper shows a brief overview of real cyber attack incidents in traditional energy networks and those targeting the smart metering network. Specifically, we present a threat taxonomy considering: (i) threats in system-level security, (ii) threats and/or theft of services, and (iii) threats to privacy. Based on the presented threats, we derive a set of security and privacy requirements for SG metering networks. Furthermore, we discuss various schemes that have been proposed to address these threats, considering the pros and cons of each. Finally, we investigate the open research issues to shed new light on future research directions in smart grid metering networks

On Securing HWMP using IBC

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a security mechanisms for the Hybrid-Wireless-Mesh Protocol (HWMP). Our mechanisms is based on the Identity Based Cryptography (IBC). The motivation behind using IBC is that it eliminates the need to verify the authenticity of public keys. We have implemented the IBC technique to secure control message in HWMP, namely RREQ (Path Request) and RREP (Path Reply). In these Control messages, we are interested only by mutable (i.e. fields that an changing during control packet exchange). Through simulation experiments, we have evaluated the performance of our IBC-HWMP in terms of delay and control overhead. +Simulation results show that the IBC-HWMP does not induce a long overhead compared to the original HWMP protocol