AMISEC: Leveraging Redundancy and Adaptability to Secure AmI Applications

Security in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) poses too many challenges due to the inherently insecure nature of wireless sensor nodes. However, there are two characteristics of these environments that can be used effectively to prevent, detect, and confine attacks: redundancy and continuous adaptation. In this article we propose a global strategy and a system architecture to cope with security issues in AmI applications at different levels. Unlike in previous approaches, we assume an individual wireless node is vulnerable. We present an agent-based architecture with supporting services that is proven to be adequate to detect and confine common attacks. Decisions at different levels are supported by a trust-based framework with good and bad reputation feedback while maintaining resistance to bad-mouthing attacks. We also propose a set of services that can be used to handle identification, authentication, and authorization in intelligent ambients. The resulting approach takes into account practical issues, such as resource limitation, bandwidth optimization, and scalability

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

Security and Privacy for Green IoT-based Agriculture: Review, Blockchain solutions, and Challenges

open access articleThis paper presents research challenges on security and privacy issues in the field of green IoT-based agriculture. We start by describing a four-tier green IoT-based agriculture architecture and summarizing the existing surveys that deal with smart agriculture. Then, we provide a classification of threat models against green IoT-based agriculture into five categories, including, attacks against privacy, authentication, confidentiality, availability, and integrity properties. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward secure and privacy-preserving technologies for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. In addition, we analyze the privacy-oriented blockchain-based solutions as well as consensus algorithms for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. Based on the current survey, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions in the security and privacy of green IoT-based agriculture

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

KALwEN: a new practical and interoperable key management scheme for body sensor networks

Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks (BSNs) pose several challenges–some inherited from wireless sensor networks (WSNs), some unique to themselves–that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new parameterized key management scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports secure global broadcast, local broadcast, and local (neighbor-to-neighbor) unicast, while preserving past key secrecy and future key secrecy (FKS). The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case. With both formal verification and experimental evaluation, our results should appeal to theorists and practitioners alike