281 research outputs found
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
Mitigating Misbehavior In Wireless Networks: A Game Theoretic Approach
In a distributed wireless system, multiple network nodes behave cooperatively towards a common goal. Though such assumptions on cooperation are desirable (e.g., controlling the transmit power level, reducing interference for each other, revealing private information, adhering to network policies) for analyzing and modeling, certain nodes belonging to a real-world system have often shown to deviate. These nodes, known as misbehaving nodes, bring more challenges to the design of the wireless network because the unreliable channel makes the actions of the nodes hidden from each other. In this dissertation, we analyze two types of misbehavior, namely, selfish noncooperation and malicious attacking. We apply game theoretic techniques to model the interactions among the nodes in the network. First, we consider a homogeneous unreliable channel and analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions to enforce cooperative packet forwarding among a node pair. We formulate an anti-collusion game and derive the conditions that achieve full cooperation when the non-cooperative nodes collude. In addition, we consider multi-hop communication with a heterogeneous channel model. We refine our game model as a hidden action game with imperfect private monitoring. A state machine based strategy is proposed to reach Nash Equilibrium. The strategy attains cooperative packet forwarding with heterogeneous channel and requires only partial and imperfect information. Furthermore, it also enforces cooperation in multi-hop packet forwarding. To tackle the malicious attacks, we use Bayesian game analysis to show the existence of equilibrium in the detection game and argue that it might not be profitable to isolate the malicious nodes upon detection. We propose the concept of coexistence with malicious nodes by proving the co-existence equilibrium and derive the conditions that achieve the equilibrium. This research is further accomplished by extensive simulation studies. Simulation results illustrate the properties of the games and the derived equilibria. The results validate our design philosophy and clearly indicate that the proposed game theoretic solutions can be effectively used to enforce cooperation and mitigate attacks
Security of the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Countermeasures
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. Hence, the security of IoT should start with foremost securing WSNs ahead of the other components. However, owing to the absence of a physical line-of-defense, i.e., there is no dedicated infrastructure such as gateways to watch and observe the flowing information in the network, security of WSNs along with IoT is of a big concern to the scientific community. More specifically, for the application areas in which CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) has prime importance, WSNs and emerging IoT technology might constitute an open avenue for the attackers. Besides, recent integration and collaboration of WSNs with IoT will open new challenges and problems in terms of security. Hence, this would be a nightmare for the individuals using these systems as well as the security administrators who are managing those networks. Therefore, a detailed review of security attacks towards WSNs and IoT, along with the techniques for prevention, detection, and mitigation of those attacks are provided in this paper. In this text, attacks are categorized and treated into mainly two parts, most or all types of attacks towards WSNs and IoT are investigated under that umbrella: “Passive Attacks” and “Active Attacks”. Understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help paving a secure path towards the proliferation and public acceptance of IoT technology
Routing Security Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks: Attacks and Defenses
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are rapidly emerging as an important new area
in wireless and mobile computing research. Applications of WSNs are numerous
and growing, and range from indoor deployment scenarios in the home and office
to outdoor deployment scenarios in adversary's territory in a tactical
battleground (Akyildiz et al., 2002). For military environment, dispersal of
WSNs into an adversary's territory enables the detection and tracking of enemy
soldiers and vehicles. For home/office environments, indoor sensor networks
offer the ability to monitor the health of the elderly and to detect intruders
via a wireless home security system. In each of these scenarios, lives and
livelihoods may depend on the timeliness and correctness of the sensor data
obtained from dispersed sensor nodes. As a result, such WSNs must be secured to
prevent an intruder from obstructing the delivery of correct sensor data and
from forging sensor data. To address the latter problem, end-to-end data
integrity checksums and post-processing of senor data can be used to identify
forged sensor data (Estrin et al., 1999; Hu et al., 2003a; Ye et al., 2004).
The focus of this chapter is on routing security in WSNs. Most of the currently
existing routing protocols for WSNs make an optimization on the limited
capabilities of the nodes and the application-specific nature of the network,
but do not any the security aspects of the protocols. Although these protocols
have not been designed with security as a goal, it is extremely important to
analyze their security properties. When the defender has the liabilities of
insecure wireless communication, limited node capabilities, and possible
insider threats, and the adversaries can use powerful laptops with high energy
and long range communication to attack the network, designing a secure routing
protocol for WSNs is obviously a non-trivial task.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables 4. arXiv admin note: substantial text
overlap with arXiv:1011.152
A Survey on Dynamic Spectrum Access Techniques in Cognitive Radio Networks
The idea of Cognitive Radio (CR) is to share the spectrum between a user called primary, and a user called secondary. Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) is a new spectrum sharing paradigm in cognitive radio that allows secondary users to access the abundant spectrum holes in the licensed spectrum bands. DSA is an auspicious technology to alleviate the spectrum scarcity problem and increase spectrum utilization. While DSA has attracted many research efforts recently, in this paper, a survey of spectrum access techniques using cooperation and competition to solve the problem of spectrum allocation in cognitive radio networks is presented
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