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

Evaluation of on-demand routing in mobile ad hoc networks and proposal for a secure routing protocol

Secure routing Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) has emerged as an important MANET research area. Initial work in MANET focused mainly on the problem of providing efficient mechanisms for finding paths in very dynamic networks, without considering the security of the routing process. Because of this, a number of attacks exploit these routing vulnerabilities to manipulate MANETs. In this thesis, we performed an in-depth evaluation and performance analysis of existing MANET Routing protocols, identifying Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) as the most robust (based on throughput, latency and routing overhead) which can be secured with negligible routing efficiency trade-off. We describe security threats, specifically showing their effects on DSR. We proposed a new routing protocol, named Authenticated Source Routing for Ad hoc Networks (ASRAN) which is an out-of-band certification-based, authenticated source routing protocol with modifications to the route acquisition process of DSR to defeat all identified attacks. Simulation studies confirm that ASRAN has a good trade-off balance in reference to the addition of security and routing efficiency

A two‐step authentication framework for Mobile ad hoc networks

The lack of fixed infrastructure in ad hoc networks causes nodes to rely more heavily on peer nodes for communication. Nevertheless, establishing trust in such a distributed environment is very difficult, since it is not straightforward for a node to determine if its peer nodes can be trusted. An additional concern in such an environment is with whether a peer node is merely relaying a message or if it is the originator of the message. In this paper, we propose an authentication approach for protecting nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. The security requirements for protecting data link and network layers are identified and the design criteria for creating secure ad hoc networks using several authentication protocols are analyzed. Protocols based on zero knowledge and challenge response techniques are presented and their performance is evaluated through analysis and simulation

Analysis of Exposed Node Problem and Security Concerns in Adhoc Networks

“The paper contains the analysis of exposed node problem in mobile adhoc network. The problem is that before starting the transmission, a station wants to know whether there is activity around the receiver. If the transmission is taking place around the receiver, there will be collisions and the effective throughput will be decreased. A detailed study of the simulation on these exposed nodes is carried out using the GloMoSim software to calculate the throughput for the various transmission powers and different protocols, so as to compare the performances by varying different parameters. These simulation results with GloMoSim corroborate our theoretical analysis.

Reliability Analysis of Link Stability in Secured Routing Protocols for MANETs

The prime characteristics of Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) are infrastructure free, absence of centralized authority and dynamic nature of nodes which are more vulnerable to security attacks. Reliability and security are prime issues to protect information and nodes in a network during communication which has received more research interest in designing a dynamic secured routing scheme. QoS is set of service requirement that needs to be satisfied by the network during the data transmission in the network. From the perception of QoS best effort protocols ensure optimum network operation in a unpredictable mobile environment. The multimedia applications are intolerable towards delay and reliability which are the features of mobile network, hence the potentials of MANET were not utilized in multimedia applications. These issues of delay and reliability of packet transmission in MANET are contributed by stability of the communication link even during the mobility of the nodes Its a necessity to analyze the performance of various secured routing protocols based on the stability of the communication link in case of mobility of nodes during data transfer. This paper is focused on a comparative study of various secured reactive routing protocols in MANET signifying the connectivity stability during the mobility of the nodes