320 research outputs found
Securing Remote Access Inside Wireless Mesh Networks
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) that are being increasingly deployed in communities and public places provide a relatively stable routing infrastructure and can be used for diverse carrier-managed services. As a particular example we consider the scenario where a mobile device initially registered for the use with one wireless network (its home network) moves to the area covered by another network inside the same mesh. The goal is to establish a secure access to the home network using the infrastructure of the mesh. Classical mechanisms such as VPNs can protect end-to-end communication between the mobile device and its home network while remaining transparent to the routing infrastructure. In WMNs this transparency can be misused for packet injection leading to the unnecessary consumption of the communication bandwidth. This may have negative impact on the cooperation of mesh routers which is essential for the connection establishment. In this paper we describe how to establish remote connections inside WMNs while guaranteeing secure end-to-end communication between the mobile device and its home network and secure transmission of the corresponding packets along the underlying multi-hop path. Our solution is a provably secure, yet lightweight and round-optimal remote network access protocol in which intermediate mesh routers are considered to be part of the security architecture. We also sketch some ideas on the practical realization of the protocol using known standards and mention extensions with regard to forward secrecy, anonymity and accounting
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
Resilient networking in wireless sensor networks
This report deals with security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs),
especially in network layer. Multiple secure routing protocols have been
proposed in the literature. However, they often use the cryptography to secure
routing functionalities. The cryptography alone is not enough to defend against
multiple attacks due to the node compromise. Therefore, we need more
algorithmic solutions. In this report, we focus on the behavior of routing
protocols to determine which properties make them more resilient to attacks.
Our aim is to find some answers to the following questions. Are there any
existing protocols, not designed initially for security, but which already
contain some inherently resilient properties against attacks under which some
portion of the network nodes is compromised? If yes, which specific behaviors
are making these protocols more resilient? We propose in this report an
overview of security strategies for WSNs in general, including existing attacks
and defensive measures. In this report we focus at the network layer in
particular, and an analysis of the behavior of four particular routing
protocols is provided to determine their inherent resiliency to insider
attacks. The protocols considered are: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR),
Gradient-Based Routing (GBR), Greedy Forwarding (GF) and Random Walk Routing
(RWR)
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
Secure Transmission To Remote Cooperative Groups With Minimized Communication Overhead
In Wireless Mesh networks there is a need to Multicast to a remote cooperative group using encrypted transmission. The existing paradigms failed to provide better efficiency and security in these kind of transmissions. A major challenge in devising such a system involves in achieving efficient usage of Bandwidth and Reducing the number of unintended receivers. In this paper we circumvent these obstacles and close this gap by involving a sender based algorithm .This new paradigm is a hybrid of traditional Multicasting, shortest path techniques and group key management. In such a system, for every source destination pair the protocol adaptively calculates the mean delays along all the utilized paths and avoid the paths with greater or equal mean delays. Which eventually reduces the usage of unwanted paths and also results in reducing the number of unintended receivers at a considerable rate. This approach efficiently deals with the computation overhead and usage of network resources. Further more our scheme provides better security by reducing the number of unintended receivers.
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