Privacy-preserving and secure location authentication

With the advent of Location-Based-Systems, positioning systems must face new security requirements: how to guarantee the authenticity of the geographical positon announced by a user before granting him access to location-restricted! resources. In this thesis, we are interested in the study of ! security ! protocols that can ensure autheniticity of the position announced by a user without the prior availability of any form of trusted architecture. A first result of our study is the proposal for a distance-bounding protocol based on asymmetric cryptography which allows a node knowing a public key to authenticate the holder of the associated private key, while establishing confidence in the distance between them. The distance measurement procedure is sufficently secure to resist to well-known attacks such as relay attacks, distance-, mafia- and terrorist-attacks. We then use such distance-bounding protocol to define an architecture for gathering privacy friendly location proofs. We define a location proof as a digital certificate attesting of presence of an individual at a location at a given time. The privacy properties we garanty through the use of our system are: the anonymity of users, un-linkability of their actions within the system and a strong binding between each user ! and the localization proof it is associated. on last property of our system is the possibility to use the same location proof to demonstrate different granularity of the associated position

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

Survey on Lightweight Primitives and Protocols for RFID in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is becoming widespread in all kind of wireless network-based applications. As expected, applications based on sensor networks, ad-hoc or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be highly benefited from the adoption of RFID solutions. There is a strong need to employ lightweight cryptographic primitives for many security applications because of the tight cost and constrained resource requirement of sensor based networks. This paper mainly focuses on the security analysis of lightweight protocols and algorithms proposed for the security of RFID systems. A large number of research solutions have been proposed to implement lightweight cryptographic primitives and protocols in sensor and RFID integration based resource constraint networks. In this work, an overview of the currently discussed lightweight primitives and their attributes has been done. These primitives and protocols have been compared based on gate equivalents (GEs), power, technology, strengths, weaknesses and attacks. Further, an integration of primitives and protocols is compared with the possibilities of their applications in practical scenarios

Factors Impacting Key Management Effectiveness in Secured Wireless Networks

The use of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) offers a cryptographic solution that can overcome many, but not all, of the MANET security problems. One of the most critical aspects of a PKI system is how well it implements Key Management. Key Management deals with key generation, key storage, key distribution, key updating, key revocation, and certificate service in accordance with security policies over the lifecycle of the cryptography. The approach supported by traditional PKI works well in fixed wired networks, but it may not appropriate for MANET due to the lack of fixed infrastructure to support the PKI. This research seeks to identify best practices in securing networks which may be applied to new network architectures