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

Heterogeneous Tree Based Authenticated Group Key Transfer Protocol

Message passing from one source to another has become a key for many upcoming technologies. This is already achieved by introduction of topics of KEYS, AUTHENTICATIONS etc. Secret key transfer is being done presently by using mutually trusted key generation centre (KGS). By this selection of session key by which encryption is done for information passing is selected. This paper discusses about the advancement of this technology by extending this service to group instead of a single key. The whole group with authenticated users can access the information. The proposed protocol considers the heterogeneity of the peer resources as QOS factor in key generation phase and shared key mechanism as primary process to achieve security in group key sharing

KALwEN: a new practical and interoperable key management scheme for body sensor networks

Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks (BSNs) pose several challenges–some inherited from wireless sensor networks (WSNs), some unique to themselves–that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new parameterized key management scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports secure global broadcast, local broadcast, and local (neighbor-to-neighbor) unicast, while preserving past key secrecy and future key secrecy (FKS). The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case. With both formal verification and experimental evaluation, our results should appeal to theorists and practitioners alike

PAWN: a payload-based mutual authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of resource-starving miniature sensor nodes deployed in a remote and hostile environment. These networks operate on small batteries for days, months, and even years depending on the requirements of monitored applications. The battery-powered operation and inaccessible human terrains make it practically infeasible to recharge the nodes unless some energy-scavenging techniques are used. These networks experience threats at various layers and, as such, are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. The resource-constrained nature of sensor nodes, inaccessible human terrains, and error-prone communication links make it obligatory to design lightweight but robust and secured schemes for these networks. In view of these limitations, we aim to design an extremely lightweight payload-based mutual authentication scheme for a cluster-based hierarchical WSN. The proposed scheme, also known as payload-based mutual authentication for WSNs, operates in 2 steps. First, an optimal percentage of cluster heads is elected, authenticated, and allowed to communicate with neighboring nodes. Second, each cluster head, in a role of server, authenticates the nearby nodes for cluster formation. We validate our proposed scheme using various simulation metrics that outperform the existing schemes

Collaborative Authentication for 6G Networks: An Edge Intelligence based Autonomous Approach

The conventional device authentication of wireless networks usually relies on a security server and centralized process, leading to long latency and risk of single-point of failure. While these challenges might be mitigated by collaborative authentication schemes, their performance remains limited by the rigidity of data collection and aggregated result. They also tend to ignore attacker localization in the collaborative authentication process. To overcome these challenges, a novel collaborative authentication scheme is proposed, where multiple edge devices act as cooperative peers to assist the service provider in distributively authenticating its users by estimating their received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and mobility trajectory (TRA). More explicitly, a distributed learning-based collaborative authentication algorithm is conceived, where the cooperative peers update their authentication models locally, thus the network congestion and response time remain low. Moreover, a situation-aware secure group update algorithm is proposed for autonomously refreshing the set of cooperative peers in the dynamic environment. We also develop an algorithm for localizing a malicious user by the cooperative peers once it is identified. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is eminently suitable for both indoor and outdoor communication scenarios, and outperforms some existing benchmark schemes

OSCAR: A Collaborative Bandwidth Aggregation System

The exponential increase in mobile data demand, coupled with growing user expectation to be connected in all places at all times, have introduced novel challenges for researchers to address. Fortunately, the wide spread deployment of various network technologies and the increased adoption of multi-interface enabled devices have enabled researchers to develop solutions for those challenges. Such solutions aim to exploit available interfaces on such devices in both solitary and collaborative forms. These solutions, however, have faced a steep deployment barrier. In this paper, we present OSCAR, a multi-objective, incentive-based, collaborative, and deployable bandwidth aggregation system. We present the OSCAR architecture that does not introduce any intermediate hardware nor require changes to current applications or legacy servers. The OSCAR architecture is designed to automatically estimate the system's context, dynamically schedule various connections and/or packets to different interfaces, be backwards compatible with the current Internet architecture, and provide the user with incentives for collaboration. We also formulate the OSCAR scheduler as a multi-objective, multi-modal scheduler that maximizes system throughput while minimizing energy consumption or financial cost. We evaluate OSCAR via implementation on Linux, as well as via simulation, and compare our results to the current optimal achievable throughput, cost, and energy consumption. Our evaluation shows that, in the throughput maximization mode, we provide up to 150% enhancement in throughput compared to current operating systems, without any changes to legacy servers. Moreover, this performance gain further increases with the availability of connection resume-supporting, or OSCAR-enabled servers, reaching the maximum achievable upper-bound throughput