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

Opportunistic mobile social networks: architecture, privacy, security issues and future directions

Mobile Social Networks and its related applications have made a very great impact in the society. Many new technologies related to mobile social networking are booming rapidly now-a-days and yet to boom. One such upcoming technology is Opportunistic Mobile Social Networking. This technology allows mobile users to communicate and exchange data with each other without the use of Internet. This paper is about Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks, its architecture, issues and some future research directions. The architecture and issues of Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks are compared with that of traditional Mobile Social Networks. The main contribution of this paper is regarding privacy and security issues in Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks. Finally, some future research directions in Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks have been elaborated regarding the data's privacy and security