An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

An Approach for Mitigating Denial of Service Attack

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are the most common types of cyber-attack on the internet and are rapidly increasing. Denial of service/distributed denial of service attack is an explicit attempt to make a machine or a network resource unavailable to its intended users. Attackers interrupt/suspend services of the host connected to internet temporarily or indefinitely.It involves saturating the target machine with external communication requests such that it cannot either respond to legitimate traffic or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. Two general form of Dos attacks are - those attacks that crashes services (computer attack) and those that flood services (network attack). Flooding DDoS attacks produce adverse effects for critical infrastructure availability, integrity and confidentiality. Current defense approaches cannot efficiently detect and filter out the attack traffic in real time. Based on the assumption that the attacker flows are very aggressive than the legitimate users the proposed work provides sufficient bandwidth to genuine users during flooding DDoS attack.The aim of the project is to implement an approach for mitigating DDoS based on “The Interface Based Rate Limiting (IBRL) algorithm”, used to mitigate the identified DDoS attacks. The implementation is carried out on a simulation tool Omnett++ installed on linux machine. The results are the plots that show that there is considerable increase in the two important and significant measures, response time and packet drop metrics for legitimate users even under DoS and DDoS attacks

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

An Efficient Analytical Solution to Thwart DDoS Attacks in Public Domain

In this paper, an analytical model for DDoS attacks detection is proposed, in which propagation of abrupt traffic changes inside public domain is monitored to detect a wide range of DDoS attacks. Although, various statistical measures can be used to construct profile of the traffic normally seen in the network to identify anomalies whenever traffic goes out of profile, we have selected volume and flow measure. Consideration of varying tolerance factors make proposed detection system scalable to the varying network conditions and attack loads in real time. NS-2 network simulator on Linux platform is used as simulation testbed. Simulation results show that our proposed solution gives a drastic improvement in terms of detection rate and false positive rate. However, the mammoth volume generated by DDoS attacks pose the biggest challenge in terms of memory and computational overheads as far as monitoring and analysis of traffic at single point connecting victim is concerned. To address this problem, a distributed cooperative technique is proposed that distributes memory and computational overheads to all edge routers for detecting a wide range of DDoS attacks at early stage.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1203.240

Secure Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to the service providers. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, with each access point (AP) connected to the wired network, in WMNs only a subset of the APs are required to be connected to the wired network. The APs that are connected to the wired network are called the Internet gateways (IGWs), while the APs that do not have wired connections are called the mesh routers (MRs). The MRs are connected to the IGWs using multi-hop communication. The IGWs provide access to conventional clients and interconnect ad hoc, sensor, cellular, and other networks to the Internet. However, most of the existing routing protocols for WMNs are extensions of protocols originally designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and thus they perform sub-optimally. Moreover, most routing protocols for WMNs are designed without security issues in mind, where the nodes are all assumed to be honest. In practical deployment scenarios, this assumption does not hold. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in WMNs and then particularly focuses on secure routing in these networks. First, it identifies security vulnerabilities in the medium access control (MAC) and the network layers. Various possibilities of compromising data confidentiality, data integrity, replay attacks and offline cryptanalysis are also discussed. Then various types of attacks in the MAC and the network layers are discussed. After enumerating the various types of attacks on the MAC and the network layer, the chapter briefly discusses on some of the preventive mechanisms for these attacks.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures, 5 table