Security and Privacy in Heterogeneous Wireless and Mobile Networks: Challenges and Solutions

abstract: The rapid advances in wireless communications and networking have given rise to a number of emerging heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks along with novel networking paradigms, including wireless sensor networks, mobile crowdsourcing, and mobile social networking. While offering promising solutions to a wide range of new applications, their widespread adoption and large-scale deployment are often hindered by people's concerns about the security, user privacy, or both. In this dissertation, we aim to address a number of challenging security and privacy issues in heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks in an attempt to foster their widespread adoption. Our contributions are mainly fivefold. First, we introduce a novel secure and loss-resilient code dissemination scheme for wireless sensor networks deployed in hostile and harsh environments. Second, we devise a novel scheme to enable mobile users to detect any inauthentic or unsound location-based top-k query result returned by an untrusted location-based service providers. Third, we develop a novel verifiable privacy-preserving aggregation scheme for people-centric mobile sensing systems. Fourth, we present a suite of privacy-preserving profile matching protocols for proximity-based mobile social networking, which can support a wide range of matching metrics with different privacy levels. Last, we present a secure combination scheme for crowdsourcing-based cooperative spectrum sensing systems that can enable robust primary user detection even when malicious cognitive radio users constitute the majority.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Electrical Engineering 201

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

This chapter discusses the need of security and privacy protection mechanisms in aggregation protocols used in wireless sensor networks (WSN). It presents a comprehensive state of the art discussion on the various privacy protection mechanisms used in WSNs and particularly focuses on the CPDA protocols proposed by He et al. (INFOCOM 2007). It identifies a security vulnerability in the CPDA protocol and proposes a mechanism to plug that vulnerability. To demonstrate the need of security in aggregation process, the chapter further presents various threats in WSN aggregation mechanisms. A large number of existing protocols for secure aggregation in WSN are discussed briefly and a protocol is proposed for secure aggregation which can detect false data injected by malicious nodes in a WSN. The performance of the protocol is also presented. The chapter concludes while highlighting some future directions of research in secure data aggregation in WSNs.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, 3 table

iPDA: An Integrity-Protecting Private Data Aggregation Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Data aggregation is an efficient mechanism widely used in wireless sensor networks (WSN) to collect statistics about data of interests. However, the shared-medium nature of communication makes the WSNs are vulnerable to eavesdropping and packet tampering/injection by adversaries. Hence, how to protect data privacy and data integrity are two major challenges for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we present iPDA??????an integrity-protecting private data aggregation scheme. In iPDA, data privacy is achieved through data slicing and assembling technique; and data integrity is achieved through redundancy by constructing disjoint aggregation paths/trees to collect data of interests. In iPDA, the data integrity-protection and data privacy-preservation mechanisms work synergistically. We evaluate the iPDA scheme in terms of the efficacy of privacy preservation, communication overhead, and data aggregation accuracy, comparing with a typical data aggregation scheme--- TAG, where no integrity protection and privacy preservation is provided. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that iPDA achieves the design goals while still maintains the efficiency of data aggregation

Addressing and Solving the problem of Data Authenticity due to Packet Dropping by Selfish Nodes in WSN

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consists of large number sensor nodes. Wireless sensor nodes are generally deployed in the far places like forests deserts and used to sense the network conditions like temperature pressure etc. In such far places it is very difficult to recharge or replace the battery of the sensor node.  The sensor nodes are battery powered devices, they communicate over a wireless medium and consumes energy during data transmission. The various types of active and passive attacks are possible in routing the data from source to sink. In this paper, we propose new technique to prevent these attacks. The mobile sinks is been deployed in the network which collect data from the sensor node and deliver data to fixed base station. In the proposed technique, the data privacy is ensured in the mobile sink. KEYWORDS WSN, Mobile Sinks, Sensor node, Query, batter

Providing Privacy and security of Wireless sensor network using ACTOR nodes

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consists of large number sensor nodes. Wireless sensor nodes are generally deployed in the far places like forests deserts and used to sense the network conditions like temperature pressure etc. In such far places it is very difficult to recharge or replace the battery of the sensor node.  The sensor nodes are battery powered devices, they communicate over a wireless medium and consumes energy during data transmission. The various types of active and passive attacks are possible in routing the data from source to sink. In this paper, we propose new technique to prevent these attacks. The mobile sinks is been deployed in the network which collect data from the sensor node and deliver data to fixed base station. In the proposed technique, the data privacy is ensured in the mobile sink. KEYWORDS WSN, Mobile Sinks, Sensor node, Query, batter