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-VIP: Anonymous Verification and Inference of Positions in Vehicular Networks

MiniconferenceInternational audienceKnowledge of the location of vehicles and tracking of the routes they follow are a requirement for a number of applications, including e-tolling and liability attribution in case of accidents. However, public disclosure of the identity and position of drivers jeopardizes user privacy, and securing the tracking through asymmetric cryptography may have an exceedingly high computational cost. Additionally, there is currently no way an authority can verify the correctness of the position information provided by a potentially misbehaving car. In this paper, we address all of the issues above by introducing A-VIP, a lightweight framework for privacy preserving and tracking of vehicles. A-VIP leverages anonymous position beacons from vehicles, and the cooperation of nearby cars collecting and reporting the beacons they hear. Such information allows an authority to verify the locations announced by vehicles, or to infer the actual ones if needed. We assess the effectiveness of A-VIP through both realistic simulation and testbed implementation results, analyzing also its resilience to adversarial attacks

The Impact of the Adversary's Eavesdropping Stations on the Location Privacy Level in Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has got the interest of different research bodies as a promising technology. IoV is mainly developed to reduce the number of crashes by enabling vehicles to sense the environment and spread their locations to the neighborhood via safety-beacons to enhance the system functioning. Nevertheless, a bunch of security and privacy threats is looming; by exploiting the spatio-data included in these beacons. A lot of privacy schemes were developed to cope with the problem like CAPS, CPN, RSP, and SLOW. The schemes provide a certain level of location privacy yet the strength of the adversary, e.g., the number of eavesdropping stations has not been fully considered. In this paper, we aim at investigating the effect of the adversary’s eavesdropping stations number and position on the overall system functioning via privacy and QoS metrics. We also show the performances of these schemes in a manhattan-grid model which gives a comparison between the used schemes. The results show that both the number and the emplacement of the eavesdropping stations have a real negative impact on the achieved location privacy of the IoV users