Inter-Domain Authentication for Seamless Roaming in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The convergence of diverse but complementary wireless access technologies and inter-operation among administrative domains have been envisioned as crucial for the next generation wireless networks that will provide support for end-user devices to seamlessly roam across domain boundaries. The integration of existing and emerging heterogeneous wireless networks to provide such seamless roaming requires the design of a handover scheme that provides uninterrupted service continuity while facilitating the establishment of authenticity of the entities involved. The existing protocols for supporting re-authentication of a mobile node during a handover across administrative domains typically involve several round trips to the home domain, and hence introduce long latencies. Furthermore, the existing methods for negotiating roaming agreements to establish inter-domain trust rely on a lengthy manual process, thus, impeding seamless roaming across multiple domains in a truly heterogeneous wireless network. In this thesis, we present a new proof-token based authentication protocol that supports quick re-authentication of a mobile node as it moves to a new foreign domain without involving communication with the home domain. The proposed proof-token based protocol can also support establishment of spontaneous roaming agreements between a pair of domains that do not already have a direct roaming agreement, thus allowing flexible business models to be supported. We describe details of the new authentication architecture, the proposed protocol, which is based on EAP-TLS and compare the proposed protocol with existing protocols

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocols for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation wireless networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to service providers. As WMNs become an increasingly popular replacement technology for last-mile connectivity to the home networking, community and neighborhood networking, it is imperative to design efficient and secure communication protocols for these networks. However, several vulnerabilities exist in currently existing protocols for WMNs. These security loopholes can be exploited by potential attackers to launch attack on WMNs. The absence of a central point of administration makes securing WMNs even more challenging. The broadcast nature of transmission and the dependency on the intermediate nodes for multi-hop communications lead to several security vulnerabilities in WMNs. The attacks can be external as well as internal in nature. External attacks are launched by intruders who are not authorized users of the network. For example, an intruding node may eavesdrop on the packets and replay those packets at a later point of time to gain access to the network resources. On the other hand, the internal attacks are launched by the nodes that are part of the WMN. On example of such attack is an intermediate node dropping packets which it was supposed to forward. This chapter presents a comprehensive discussion on the current authentication and privacy protection schemes for WMN. In addition, it proposes a novel security protocol for node authentication and message confidentiality and an anonymization scheme for privacy protection of users in WMNs.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures. The work is an extended version of the author's previous works submitted in CoRR: arXiv:1107.5538v1 and arXiv:1102.1226v

Supporting Secure and Transparent Mobility in Wireless Local-Area Networks

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are experiencing unprecedented growth as the last mile connectivity solution. Mobility is an important feature of any wireless communication system. Handoffs are a crucial link level functionality that enable a mobile user to stay connected to a wireless network by switching the data connection from one base station or access point to another. Conceptually the handoff process can be subdivided into two phases: (i) Discovery - wherein the client searches for APs in vicinity and (ii) Authentication - the client authenticates to an AP selected from the discovery phase. The handoff procedure recommended by the IEEE 802.11 standard and closely implemented by various wireless vendors is an intrusive and a brute-force approach. My testbed based study of these algorithms showed that they incur high latencies varying between 400ms to 1.3 seconds depending on the security settings in effect. Such inefficient handoff mechanisms can have a detrimental impact on applications especially synchronous multimedia connections such as Voice over IP. In my dissertation, I have proposed and evaluated the notion of locality among APs induced by user mobility patterns. A relation is created among APs which captures this locality in a graph theoretic manner called neighbor graphs -- a distributed structure that autonomously captures such locality. Based on this, I have designed and evaluated efficient mechanisms to address the two different phases of this handoff process. Through a rigorous testbed based implementation, I have demonstrated the viability of the concept of mobility induced locality through good performance improvements. Through extensive simulations I have studied the performance of proposed handoff mechanisms over various different topologies. This work has shown that a topological structure which captures the locality relationship among APs is fundamental to designing mechanisms that make user mobility transparent from the higher layers of the networking stack

A Survey of Different Dos Attacks on Wireless Network

Wireless technologies like Wireless LAN (WLAN) 802.11 picking up ubiquity in all associations, undertakings and colleges because of its profitability, cost sparing when contrasted with wired system and usability by enabling the system clients to move physically while keeping up an association with the wireless system. Wireless systems are main stream among the Laptop client group today in light of the portability and usability. Individuals working through remote association must know about the surroundings because of the different sorts of assaults made by the interlopers. Remote systems are extremely defenseless against (Denial of Service) DoS attacks. DoS attacks are an endeavor to make a machine or system asset inaccessible to its clients. It can happen in numerous layers of OSI demonstrate and can happen in different frame Network clients can ensure their frameworks with Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) security conventions and Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), however DoS attack still can't be averted utilizing these conventions. These attacks bring about debasement of the system quality or finish loss of accessibility of the system inside the association. This survey paper makes a review on various kinds of DoS attacks and their countermeasures on the framework systems which depend on the Access Points (AP). The fundamental assaults called Deauthentication and Disassociation Flooding. DoS assaults are considered there avoidance/discovery arrangements. Keywords- Access Points, DoS, Wireless Security, 802.11, Disassociation, Deauthentication, Flooding attack

Untraceable Authentication Protocol for IEEE802.11s Standard

In the current paper, a new handover authentication protocol for IEEE802.11s Wireless mesh networks is presented. The new protocol divides the network into a number of cells, each cell contains a number of access points and based on the concept of ticket authentication, the mesh user takes a new ticket when enters the region of a new cell which decreases the handover latency. Moreover, in the current paper, a new idea for ticket generation is proposed, called Chain Ticket Derivation Function (CTDF), which uses the concept of a chain. Using CTDF in our proposed protocol raises the level of privacy for the users. The security analysis presented in the paper showed more strengths in our proposed scheme. Two formal verification tools, AVISPA and BAN logic are used to test the proposed protocol

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

Wireless Handoff Optimization: A Comparison of IEEE 802.11r and HOKEY

Abstract. IEEE 802.11 or Wi-Fi has long been the most widely deployed technology for wireless broadband Internet access, yet it is increasingly facing competition from other technologies such as packet-switched cellular data. End user expectations and demands have grown towards a more mobile and agile network. At one end, users demand more and more mobility and on the other end, they expect a good QoS which is sufficient to meet the needs of VoIP and streaming video. However, as the 4G technologies start knocking at doors, 802.11 is being questioned for its mobility and QoS (Quality of Service). Unnecessary handoffs and reauthentication during handoffs result in higher latencies. Recent research shows that if the handoff latency is high, services like VoIP experience excessive jitter. Bulk of the handoff latency is caused by security mechanisms, such as the 4-way handshake and, in particular, EAP authentication to a remote authentication server. IEEE 802.11r and HandOver KEY (HOKEY) are protocol enhancements that have been introduced to mitigate these challenges and to manage fast and secure handoffs in a seamless manner. 802.11r extends the 802.11 base specification to support fast handoff in the MAC protocol. On the other hand, HOKEY is a suite of protocols standardized by IETF to support fast handoffs. This paper analyzes the applicability of 802.11r and HOKEY solutions to enable fast authentication and fast handoffs. It also presents an overview of the fast handoff solutions proposed in some recent research

Remote software upload techniques in future vehicles and their performance analysis

Updating software in vehicle Electronic Control Units (ECUs) will become a mandatory requirement for a variety of reasons, for examples, to update/fix functionality of an existing system, add new functionality, remove software bugs and to cope up with ITS infrastructure. Software modules of advanced vehicles can be updated using Remote Software Upload (RSU) technique. The RSU employs infrastructure-based wireless communication technique where the software supplier sends the software to the targeted vehicle via a roadside Base Station (BS). However, security is critically important in RSU to avoid any disasters due to malfunctions of the vehicle or to protect the proprietary algorithms from hackers, competitors or people with malicious intent. In this thesis, a mechanism of secure software upload in advanced vehicles is presented which employs mutual authentication of the software provider and the vehicle using a pre-shared authentication key before sending the software. The software packets are sent encrypted with a secret key along with the Message Digest (MD). In order to increase the security level, it is proposed the vehicle to receive more than one copy of the software along with the MD in each copy. The vehicle will install the new software only when it receives more than one identical copies of the software. In order to validate the proposition, analytical expressions of average number of packet transmissions for successful software update is determined. Different cases are investigated depending on the vehicle\u27s buffer size and verification methods. The analytical and simulation results show that it is sufficient to send two copies of the software to the vehicle to thwart any security attack while uploading the software. The above mentioned unicast method for RSU is suitable when software needs to be uploaded to a single vehicle. Since multicasting is the most efficient method of group communication, updating software in an ECU of a large number of vehicles could benefit from it. However, like the unicast RSU, the security requirements of multicast communication, i.e., authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of the software transmitted and access control of the group members is challenging. In this thesis, an infrastructure-based mobile multicasting for RSU in vehicle ECUs is proposed where an ECU receives the software from a remote software distribution center using the road side BSs as gateways. The Vehicular Software Distribution Network (VSDN) is divided into small regions administered by a Regional Group Manager (RGM). Two multicast Group Key Management (GKM) techniques are proposed based on the degree of trust on the BSs named Fully-trusted (FT) and Semi-trusted (ST) systems. Analytical models are developed to find the multicast session establishment latency and handover latency for these two protocols. The average latency to perform mutual authentication of the software vendor and a vehicle, and to send the multicast session key by the software provider during multicast session initialization, and the handoff latency during multicast session is calculated. Analytical and simulation results show that the link establishment latency per vehicle of our proposed schemes is in the range of few seconds and the ST system requires few ms higher time than the FT system. The handoff latency is also in the range of few seconds and in some cases ST system requires less handoff time than the FT system. Thus, it is possible to build an efficient GKM protocol without putting too much trust on the BSs

Autoconfiguration, Registration and Mobility Management for Pervasive Computing

Special Issue of Pervasive Computing</p