Intrusion Detection System for detecting internal threats in 6LoWPAN

6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Network) is a standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force group to enable the Wireless Sensor Networks to connect to the IPv6 Internet. This standard is rapidly gaining popularity for its applicability, ranging extensively from health care to environmental monitoring. Security is one of the most crucial issues that need to be considered properly in 6LoWPAN. Common 6LoWPAN security threats can come from external or internal attackers. Cryptographic techniques are helpful in protecting the external attackers from illegally joining the network. However, because the network devices are commonly not tampered-proof, the attackers can break the cryptography codes of such devices and use them to operate like an internal source. These malicious sources can create internal attacks, which may downgrade significantly network performance. Protecting the network from these internal threats has therefore become one of the centre security problems on 6LoWPAN. This thesis investigates the security issues created by the internal threats in 6LoWPAN and proposes the use of Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to deal with such threats. Our main works are to categorise the 6LoWPAN threats into two major types, and to develop two different IDSs to detect each of this type effectively. The major contributions of this thesis are summarised as below. First, we categorise the 6LoWPAN internal threats into two main types, one that focuses on compromising directly the network performance (performance-type) and the other is to manipulate the optimal topology (topology-type), to later downgrade the network service quality indirectly. In each type, we select some typical threats to implement, and assess their particular impacts on network performance as well as identify performance metrics that are sensitive in the attacked situations, in order to form the basis detection knowledge. In addition, on studying the topology-type, we propose several novel attacks towards the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy network (RPL - the underlying routing protocol in 6LoWPAN), including the Rank attack, Local Repair attack and DIS attack. Second, we develop a Bayesian-based IDS to detect the performance-type internal threats by monitoring typical attacking targets such as traffic, channel or neighbour nodes. Unlike other statistical approaches, which have a limited view by just using a single metric to monitor a specific attack, our Bayesian-based IDS can judge an abnormal behaviour with a wiser view by considering of different metrics using the insightful understanding of their relations. Such wiser view helps to increase the IDS’s accuracy significantly. Third, we develop a Specification-based IDS module to detect the topology-type internal threats based on profiling the RPL operation. In detail, we generalise the observed states and transitions of RPL control messages to construct a high-level abstract of node operations through analysing the trace files of the simulations. Our profiling technique can form all of the protocol’s legal states and transitions automatically with corresponding statistic data, which is faster and easier to verify compare with other manual specification techniques. This IDS module can detect the topology-type threats quickly with a low rate of false detection. We also propose a monitoring architecture that uses techniques from modern technologies such as LTE (Long-term Evolution), cloud computing, and multiple interface sensor devices, to expand significantly the capability of the IDS in 6LoWPAN. This architecture can enable the running of both two proposed IDSs without much overhead created, to help the system to deal with most of the typical 6LoWPAN internal threats. Overall, the simulation results in Contiki Cooja prove that our two IDS modules are effective in detecting the 6LoWPAN internal threats, with the detection accuracy is ranging between 86 to 100% depends on the types of attacks, while the False Positive is also satisfactory, with under 5% for most of the attacks. We also show that the additional energy consumptions and the overhead of the solutions are at an acceptable level to be used in the 6LoWPAN environment

Security protocols suite for machine-to-machine systems

Nowadays, the great diffusion of advanced devices, such as smart-phones, has shown that there is a growing trend to rely on new technologies to generate and/or support progress; the society is clearly ready to trust on next-generation communication systems to face today’s concerns on economic and social fields. The reason for this sociological change is represented by the fact that the technologies have been open to all users, even if the latter do not necessarily have a specific knowledge in this field, and therefore the introduction of new user-friendly applications has now appeared as a business opportunity and a key factor to increase the general cohesion among all citizens. Within the actors of this technological evolution, wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are becoming of great importance. These wireless networks are made up of interconnected low-power devices that are able to provide a great variety of services with little or even no user intervention. Examples of these services can be fleet management, fire detection, utilities consumption (water and energy distribution, etc.) or patients monitoring. However, since any arising technology goes together with its security threats, which have to be faced, further studies are necessary to secure wireless M2M technology. In this context, main threats are those related to attacks to the services availability and to the privacy of both the subscribers’ and the services providers’ data. Taking into account the often limited resources of the M2M devices at the hardware level, ensuring the availability and privacy requirements in the range of M2M applications while minimizing the waste of valuable resources is even more challenging. Based on the above facts, this Ph. D. thesis is aimed at providing efficient security solutions for wireless M2M networks that effectively reduce energy consumption of the network while not affecting the overall security services of the system. With this goal, we first propose a coherent taxonomy of M2M network that allows us to identify which security topics deserve special attention and which entities or specific services are particularly threatened. Second, we define an efficient, secure-data aggregation scheme that is able to increase the network lifetime by optimizing the energy consumption of the devices. Third, we propose a novel physical authenticator or frame checker that minimizes the communication costs in wireless channels and that successfully faces exhaustion attacks. Fourth, we study specific aspects of typical key management schemes to provide a novel protocol which ensures the distribution of secret keys for all the cryptographic methods used in this system. Fifth, we describe the collaboration with the WAVE2M community in order to define a proper frame format actually able to support the necessary security services, including the ones that we have already proposed; WAVE2M was funded to promote the global use of an emerging wireless communication technology for ultra-low and long-range services. And finally sixth, we provide with an accurate analysis of privacy solutions that actually fit M2M-networks services’ requirements. All the analyses along this thesis are corroborated by simulations that confirm significant improvements in terms of efficiency while supporting the necessary security requirements for M2M networks