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

A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

An Authentication and Key Establishment Scheme for the IP-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Integration between wireless sensor networks and traditional IP networks using the IPv6 and 6LoWPAN standards is a very active research and application area. A combination of hybrid network significantly increases the complexity of addressing connectivity and fault tolerance problems in a highly heterogeneous environment, including for example different packet sizes in different networks. In such challenging conditions, securing the communication between nodes with very diverse computational, memory and energy storage resources is at the same time an essential requirement and a very complex issue. In this paper we present an efficient and secure mutual authentication and key establishment protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) by which different classes of nodes, with very different capabilities, can authenticate each other and establish a secret key for secure communication. The analysis of the proposed scheme shows that it provides good network connectivity and resilience against some well known attacks

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

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

This chapter discusses the need of security and privacy protection mechanisms in aggregation protocols used in wireless sensor networks (WSN). It presents a comprehensive state of the art discussion on the various privacy protection mechanisms used in WSNs and particularly focuses on the CPDA protocols proposed by He et al. (INFOCOM 2007). It identifies a security vulnerability in the CPDA protocol and proposes a mechanism to plug that vulnerability. To demonstrate the need of security in aggregation process, the chapter further presents various threats in WSN aggregation mechanisms. A large number of existing protocols for secure aggregation in WSN are discussed briefly and a protocol is proposed for secure aggregation which can detect false data injected by malicious nodes in a WSN. The performance of the protocol is also presented. The chapter concludes while highlighting some future directions of research in secure data aggregation in WSNs.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, 3 table

Interleaved Honeypot-Framing Model with Secure MAC Policies for Wireless Sensor Networks

The Wireless Medium Access Control (WMAC) protocol functions by handling various data frames in order to forward them to neighbor sensor nodes. Under this circumstance, WMAC policies need secure data communication rules and intrusion detection procedures to safeguard the data from attackers. The existing secure Medium Access Control (MAC) policies provide expected and predictable practices against channel attackers. These security policies can be easily breached by any intelligent attacks or malicious actions. The proposed Wireless Interleaved Honeypot-Framing Model (WIHFM) newly implements distributed honeypot-based security mechanisms in each sensor node to act reactively against various attackers. The proposed WIHFM creates an optimal Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) channel model, Wireless Interleaved Honeypot Frames (WIHFs), secure hash-based random frame-interleaving principles, node-centric honeypot engines, and channel-covering techniques. Compared to various existing MAC security policies, the proposed model transforms unpredictable IHFs into legitimate frame sequences against channel attackers. Additionally, introducing WIHFs is a new-fangled approach for distributed WSNs. The successful development of the proposed WIHFM ensures resilient security standards and neighbor-based intrusion alert procedures for protecting MAC frames. Particularly, the proposed wireless honeypot methodology creates a novel idea of using honeypot frame traps against open wireless channel attacks. The development of a novel wireless honeypot traps deals with various challenges such as distributed honeypot management principles (node-centric honeypot, secretly interleaved-framing principles, and interleaving/de-interleaving procedures), dynamic network backbone management principles (On Demand Acyclic Connectivity model), and distributed attack isolation policies. This effort provides an effective wireless attack-trapping solution in dynamic WSNs. The simulation results show the advantage of the proposed WIHFM over the existing techniques such as Secure Zebra MAC (SZ-MAC), Blockchain-Assisted Secure-Routing Mechanism (BASR), and the Trust-Based Node Evaluation (TBNE) procedure. The experimental section confirms the proposed model attains a 10% to 14% superior performance compared to the existing techniques