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 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

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)

Reliable Bidirectional Data Transfer Approach for the Internet of Secured Medical Things Using ZigBee Wireless Network

[EN] Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) performs robust services for real-time applications in monitoring communication systems and generating meaningful information. The ZigBee devices offer low latency and manageable costs for wireless communication and support the process of physical data collection. Some biosensing systems comprise IoT-based ZigBee devices to monitor patient healthcare attributes and alert healthcare professionals for needed action. However, most of them still face unstable and frequent data interruption issues due to transmission service intrusions. Moreover, the medical data is publicly available using cloud services, and communicated through the smart devices to specialists for evaluation and disease diagnosis. Therefore, the applicable security analysis is another key factor for any medical system. This work proposed an approach for reliable network supervision with the internet of secured medical things using ZigBee networks for a smart healthcare system (RNM-SC). It aims to improve data systems with manageable congestion through load-balanced devices. Moreover, it also increases security performance in the presence of anomalies and offers data routing using the bidirectional heuristics technique. In addition, it deals with more realistic algorithm to associate only authorized devices and avoid the chances of compromising data. In the end, the communication between cloud and network applications is also protected from hostile actions, and only certified end-users can access the data. The proposed approach was tested and analyzed in Network Simulator (NS-3), and, compared to existing solutions, demonstrated significant and reliable performance improvements in terms of network throughput by 12%, energy consumption by 17%, packet drop ratio by 37%, end-to-end delay by 18%, routing complexity by 37%, and tampered packets by 37%.This research is supported by Artificial Intelligence & Data Analytics Lab (AIDA) CCIS Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Authors are thankful for the support.Rehman, A.; Haseeb, K.; Fati, SM.; Lloret, J.; Peñalver Herrero, ML. (2021). Reliable Bidirectional Data Transfer Approach for the Internet of Secured Medical Things Using ZigBee Wireless Network. Applied Sciences. 11(21):1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11219947S116112

NB-JNCD Coding and Iterative Joint Decoding Scheme for a Reliable communication in Wireless sensor Networks with results

Privacy threat is a very serious issue in multi-hop wireless networks (MWNs) since open wireless channels are vulnerable to malicious attacks. A distributed random linear network coding approach for transmission and compression of information in general multisource multicast networks. Network nodes independently and randomly select linear mappings from inputs onto output links over some field. Network coding has the potential to thwart traffic analysis attacks since the coding/mixing operation is encouraged at intermediate nodes. However, the simple deployment of network coding cannot achieve the goal once enough packets are collected by the adversaries. This paper proposes non-binary joint network-channel coding for reliable communication in wireless networks. NB-JNCC seamlessly combines non-binary channel coding and random linear network coding, and uses an iterative two-tier coding scheme that weproposed to jointly exploit redundancy inside packets and across packets for error recovery

Game Theory-Based Cooperation for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks: Taxonomy, Review, Research Challenges and Directions.

Exploring and monitoring the underwater world using underwater sensors is drawing a lot of attention these days. In this field cooperation between acoustic sensor nodes has been a critical problem due to the challenging features such as acoustic channel failure (sound signal), long propagation delay of acoustic signal, limited bandwidth and loss of connectivity. There are several proposed methods to improve cooperation between the nodes by incorporating information/game theory in the node's cooperation. However, there is a need to classify the existing works and demonstrate their performance in addressing the cooperation issue. In this paper, we have conducted a review to investigate various factors affecting cooperation in underwater acoustic sensor networks. We study various cooperation techniques used for underwater acoustic sensor networks from different perspectives, with a concentration on communication reliability, energy consumption, and security and present a taxonomy for underwater cooperation. Moreover, we further review how the game theory can be applied to make the nodes cooperate with each other. We further analyze different cooperative game methods, where their performance on different metrics is compared. Finally, open issues and future research direction in underwater acoustic sensor networks are highlighted

BAN-GZKP: Optimal Zero Knowledge Proof based Scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks

BANZKP is the best to date Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) based secure lightweight and energy efficient authentication scheme designed for Wireless Area Network (WBAN). It is vulnerable to several security attacks such as the replay attack, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks at sink and redundancy information crack. However, BANZKP needs an end-to-end authentication which is not compliant with the human body postural mobility. We propose a new scheme BAN-GZKP. Our scheme improves both the security and postural mobility resilience of BANZKP. Moreover, BAN-GZKP uses only a three-phase authentication which is optimal in the class of ZKP protocols. To fix the security vulnerabilities of BANZKP, BAN-GZKP uses a novel random key allocation and a Hop-by-Hop authentication definition. We further prove the reliability of our scheme to various attacks including those to which BANZKP is vulnerable. Furthermore, via extensive simulations we prove that our scheme, BAN-GZKP, outperforms BANZKP in terms of reliability to human body postural mobility for various network parameters (end-to-end delay, number of packets exchanged in the network, number of transmissions). We compared both schemes using representative convergecast strategies with various transmission rates and human postural mobility. Finally, it is important to mention that BAN-GZKP has no additional cost compared to BANZKP in terms memory, computational complexity or energy consumption