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

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

An Efficient Secure Group Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks in IoT Environment

Internet of Things(IoT) consist of interconnected devices for transmitting and receiving the data over the network. Key management is important for data confidentiality while transmitting in an open network. Even though several key management techniques are feasible to use, still obtaining a key management technique is a challenge with respect to energy and computational cost. The main intention of this work is to discover and overcome the design issues of the existing system and implement a lightweight and secure solution for that issue. The existing system has a fatal security flaw that leads to the unavailability of a complete system which is considered a huge problem in Internet of things. To overcome this issue, an authenticated key management protocol is proposed which deals with the problem of single point of failure and maintains the security properties of the existing system. An authenticated scheme is provided using elliptic curve and hash functions. This scheme also provides client addition, deletion and key freshness. Security analysis and computation complexity has been also discussed. We experimented proposed algorithm and tested with Scyther verification tool. The design overcomes the issues of an existing system by utilizing our scheme in peer to peer network. This network resolves the issue of a single point of failure (SPOF) by distributing the resources and services to the multiple nodes in the network. It will dissolve the problem of SPOF and will increase the reliability and scalability of the IoT system

An anonymous authentication and key establish scheme for smart grid: FAuth

The smart meters in electricity grids enable fine-grained consumption monitoring. Thus, suppliers could adjust their tariffs. However, as smart meters are deployed within the smart grid field, authentication and key establishment between smart grid parties (smart meters, aggregators, and servers) become an urgency. Besides, as privacy is becoming a big concern for smart meters, smart grid parties are reluctant to leak their real identities during the authentication phase. In this paper, we analyze the recent authentication schemes in smart grids and other applied fields, and propose an anonymous authentication and key establishment scheme between smart grid parties: FAuth. The proposed scheme is based on bilinear maps and the computational Diffie–Hellman problem. We changed the way the smart meter parties registered at Key Generation Center, making the proposed scheme robust against various potential attacks that could be launched by the Key Generation Center, as the scheme could avoid the private key of the smart meter parties from leaking to the Key Generation Center. Besides, the proposed scheme reduced the computational load, both at the smart meter side and at the aggregator side, which make it perfectly suitable for computation-constrained devices. Security proof results show the proposed scheme is secure under the BAN logic and random oracle model

Dynamic Reciprocal Authentication Protocol for Mobile Cloud Computing

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.A combination of mobile and cloud computing delivers many advantages such as mobility, resources, and accessibility through seamless data transmission via the Internet anywhere at any time. However, data transmission through vulnerable channels poses security threats such as man-in-the-middle, playback, impersonation, and asynchronization attacks. To address these threats, we define an explicit security model that can precisely measure the practical capabilities of an adversary. A systematic methodology consisting of 16 evaluation criteria is used for comparative evaluation, thereby leading other approaches to be evaluated through a common scale. Finally, we propose a dynamic reciprocal authentication protocol to secure data transmission in mobile cloud computing (MCC). In particular, our proposed protocol develops a secure reciprocal authentication method, which is free of Diffie–Hellman limitations, and has immunity against basic or sophisticated known attacks. The protocol utilizes multifactor authentication of usernames, passwords, and a one-time password (OTP). The OTP is automatically generated and regularly updated for every connection. The proposed protocol is implemented and tested using Java to demonstrate its efficiency in authenticating communications and securing data transmitted in the MCC environment. Results of the evaluation process indicate that compared with the existing works, the proposed protocol possesses obvious capabilities in security and in communication and computation costs