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

Supporting Business Privacy Protection in Wireless Sensor Networks

With the pervasive use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) within commercial environments, business privacy leakage due to the exposure of sensitive information transmitted in a WSN has become a major issue for enterprises. We examine business privacy protection in the application of WSNs. We propose a business privacy-protection system (BPS) that is modeled as a hierarchical profile in order to filter sensitive information with respect to enterprise-specified privacy requirements. The BPS aims at solving a tradeoff between metrics that are defined to estimate the utility of information and the business privacy risk. We design profile, risk assessment, and filtration agents to implement the BPS based on multiagent technology. The effectiveness of our proposed BPS is validated by experiments

Privacy in wireless sensor networks using ring signature

AbstractThe veracity of a message from a sensor node must be verified in order to avoid a false reaction by the sink. This verification requires the authentication of the source node. The authentication process must also preserve the privacy such that the node and the sensed object are not endangered. In this work, a ring signature was proposed to authenticate the source node while preserving its spatial privacy. However, other nodes as signers and their numbers must be chosen to preclude the possibility of a traffic analysis attack by an adversary. The spatial uncertainty increases with the number of signers but requires larger memory size and communication overhead. This requirement can breach the privacy of the sensed object. To determine the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, the location estimate of a sensor node by an adversary and enhancement in the location uncertainty with a ring signature was evaluated. Using simulation studies, the ring signature was estimated to require approximately four members from the same neighbor region of the source node to sustain the privacy of the node. Furthermore, the ring signature was also determined to have a small overhead and not to adversely affect the performance of the sensor network

From nowhere to somewhere : protecting end-to-end location privacy in wireless sensor networks

2010-2011 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperAccepted ManuscriptPublishe

ABAKA : a novel attribute-based k-anonymous collaborative solution for LBSs

The increasing use of mobile devices, along with advances in telecommunication systems, increased the popularity of Location-Based Services (LBSs). In LBSs, users share their exact location with a potentially untrusted Location-Based Service Provider (LBSP). In such a scenario, user privacy becomes a major con- cern: the knowledge about user location may lead to her identification as well as a continuous tracing of her position. Researchers proposed several approaches to preserve users’ location privacy. They also showed that hiding the location of an LBS user is not enough to guarantee her privacy, i.e., user’s pro- file attributes or background knowledge of an attacker may reveal the user’s identity. In this paper we propose ABAKA, a novel collaborative approach that provides identity privacy for LBS users considering users’ profile attributes. In particular, our solution guarantees p -sensitive k -anonymity for the user that sends an LBS request to the LBSP. ABAKA computes a cloaked area by collaborative multi-hop forwarding of the LBS query, and using Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). We ran a thorough set of experiments to evaluate our solution: the results confirm the feasibility and efficiency of our proposal

AnonySense: A System for Anonymous Opportunistic Sensing

We describe AnonySense, a privacy-aware system for realizing pervasive applications based on collaborative, opportunistic sensing by personal mobile devices. AnonySense allows applications to submit sensing \emphtasks\/ to be distributed across participating mobile devices, later receiving verified, yet anonymized, sensor data \emphreports\/ back from the field, thus providing the first secure implementation of this participatory sensing model. We describe our security goals, threat model, and the architecture and protocols of AnonySense. We also describe how AnonySense can support extended security features that can be useful for different applications. We evaluate the security and feasibility of AnonySense through security analysis and prototype implementation. We show the feasibility of our approach through two plausible applications: a Wi-Fi rogue access point detector and a lost-object finder

Privacy models in wireless sensor networks: a survey

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are attracting attention from the research community. One of the key issues is to provide them with privacy protection. In recent years, a huge amount of contributions has been focused on this area. Surveys and literature reviews have also been produced to give a systematic view of the different approaches taken. However, no previous work has focused on privacy models, that is, the set of assumptions made to build the approach. In particular, this paper focuses on this matter by studying 41 papers of the last 5 years. We highlight the great differences appearing among related papers that could make them incompatible to be applied simultaneously. We propose a set of guidelines to build comprehensive privacy models so as to foster their comparability and suitability analysis for different scenarios.This work was supported by the MINECO Grant TIN2013-46469-R (Security and Privacy in the Internet of You (SPINY)) and the CAM Grant S2013/ICE-3095 (Cybersecurity,Data, and Risks (CIBERDINE)), which is cofunded by EuropeanFunds (FEDER). Furthermore, J.M. de Fuentes and L. González-Manzano were also partially supported by the Programa de Ayudas a la Movilidad of Carlos III University of Madrid