223 research outputs found
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)
Quality-of-service in wireless sensor networks: state-of-the-art and future directions
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of today’s most prominent instantiations
of the ubiquituous computing paradigm. In order to achieve high
levels of integration, WSNs need to be conceived considering requirements
beyond the mere system’s functionality. While Quality-of-Service (QoS) is
traditionally associated with bit/data rate, network throughput, message delay
and bit/packet error rate, we believe that this concept is too strict, in
the sense that these properties alone do not reflect the overall quality-ofservice
provided to the user/application. Other non-functional properties
such as scalability, security or energy sustainability must also be considered
in the system design. This paper identifies the most important non-functional
properties that affect the overall quality of the service provided to the users,
outlining their relevance, state-of-the-art and future research directions
Intrusion Tolerant Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks
This MSc thesis is focused in the study, solution proposal and experimental evaluation of security solutions for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The objectives are centered on intrusion tolerant routing services, adapted for the characteristics and requirements of WSN nodes and operation behavior.
The main contribution addresses the establishment of pro-active intrusion tolerance properties at the network level, as security mechanisms for the proposal of a reliable and secure routing protocol. Those properties and mechanisms will augment a secure communication base layer supported by light-weigh cryptography methods, to improve the global network resilience capabilities against possible intrusion-attacks on the WSN nodes. Adapting to WSN characteristics, the design of the intended security services also pushes complexity away from resource-poor sensor nodes towards resource-rich and trustable base stations.
The devised solution will construct, securely and efficiently, a secure tree-structured routing service for data-dissemination in large scale deployed WSNs. The purpose is to tolerate the damage caused by adversaries modeled according with the Dolev-Yao threat model and ISO X.800 attack typology and framework, or intruders that can compromise maliciously the deployed sensor nodes, injecting, modifying, or blocking packets, jeopardizing the correct behavior of internal network routing processing and topology management.
The proposed enhanced mechanisms, as well as the design and implementation of a new intrusiontolerant routing protocol for a large scale WSN are evaluated by simulation. For this purpose, the evaluation is based on a rich simulation environment, modeling networks from hundreds to tens of thousands of wireless sensors, analyzing different dimensions: connectivity conditions, degree-distribution patterns, latency and average short-paths, clustering, reliability metrics and energy cost
Coordination and Self-Adaptive Communication Primitives for Low-Power Wireless Networks
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a recent trend where objects are augmented with computing and communication capabilities, often via low-power wireless radios. The Internet of Things is an enabler for a connected and more sustainable modern society: smart grids are deployed to improve energy production and consumption, wireless monitoring systems allow smart factories to detect faults early and reduce waste, while connected vehicles coordinate on the road to ensure our safety and save fuel. Many recent IoT applications have stringent requirements for their wireless communication substrate: devices must cooperate and coordinate, must perform efficiently under varying and sometimes extreme environments, while strict deadlines must be met. Current distributed coordination algorithms have high overheads and are unfit to meet the requirements of today\u27s wireless applications, while current wireless protocols are often best-effort and lack the guarantees provided by well-studied coordination solutions. Further, many communication primitives available today lack the ability to adapt to dynamic environments, and are often tuned during their design phase to reach a target performance, rather than be continuously updated at runtime to adapt to reality.In this thesis, we study the problem of efficient and low-latency consensus in the context of low-power wireless networks, where communication is unreliable and nodes can fail, and we investigate the design of a self-adaptive wireless stack, where the communication substrate is able to adapt to changes to its environment. We propose three new communication primitives: Wireless Paxos brings fault-tolerant consensus to low-power wireless networking, STARC is a middleware for safe vehicular coordination at intersections, while Dimmer builds on reinforcement learning to provide adaptivity to low-power wireless networks. We evaluate in-depth each primitive on testbed deployments and we provide an open-source implementation to enable their use and improvement by the community
Smart Wireless Sensor Networks
The recent development of communication and sensor technology results in the growth of a new attractive and challenging area - wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A wireless sensor network which consists of a large number of sensor nodes is deployed in environmental fields to serve various applications. Facilitated with the ability of wireless communication and intelligent computation, these nodes become smart sensors which do not only perceive ambient physical parameters but also be able to process information, cooperate with each other and self-organize into the network. These new features assist the sensor nodes as well as the network to operate more efficiently in terms of both data acquisition and energy consumption. Special purposes of the applications require design and operation of WSNs different from conventional networks such as the internet. The network design must take into account of the objectives of specific applications. The nature of deployed environment must be considered. The limited of sensor nodesďż˝ resources such as memory, computational ability, communication bandwidth and energy source are the challenges in network design. A smart wireless sensor network must be able to deal with these constraints as well as to guarantee the connectivity, coverage, reliability and security of network's operation for a maximized lifetime. This book discusses various aspects of designing such smart wireless sensor networks. Main topics includes: design methodologies, network protocols and algorithms, quality of service management, coverage optimization, time synchronization and security techniques for sensor networks
Intrusion tolerant routing with data consensus in wireless sensor networks
Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em
Engenharia InformáticaWireless sensor networks (WSNs) are rapidly emerging and growing as an important
new area in computing and wireless networking research. Applications of WSNs are numerous,
growing, and ranging from small-scale indoor deployment scenarios in homes
and buildings to large scale outdoor deployment settings in natural, industrial, military
and embedded environments. In a WSN, the sensor nodes collect data to monitor physical
conditions or to measure and pre-process physical phenomena, and forward that
data to special computing nodes called Syncnodes or Base Stations (BSs). These nodes
are eventually interconnected, as gateways, to other processing systems running applications.
In large-scale settings, WSNs operate with a large number of sensors – from hundreds
to thousands of sensor nodes – organised as ad-hoc multi-hop or mesh networks, working
without human supervision. Sensor nodes are very limited in computation, storage,
communication and energy resources. These limitations impose particular challenges in
designing large scale reliable and secure WSN services and applications. However, as
sensors are very limited in their resources they tend to be very cheap. Resilient solutions
based on a large number of nodes with replicated capabilities, are possible approaches to
address dependability concerns, namely reliability and security requirements and fault
or intrusion tolerant network services.
This thesis proposes, implements and tests an intrusion tolerant routing service for
large-scale dependable WSNs. The service is based on a tree-structured multi-path routing
algorithm, establishing multi-hop and multiple disjoint routes between sensors and
a group of BSs. The BS nodes work as an overlay, processing intrusion tolerant data consensus
over the routed data. In the proposed solution the multiple routes are discovered,
selected and established by a self-organisation process. The solution allows the WSN
nodes to collect and route data through multiple disjoint routes to the different BSs, with
a preventive intrusion tolerance approach, while handling possible Byzantine attacks and
failures in sensors and BS with a pro-active recovery strategy supported by intrusion and
fault tolerant data-consensus algorithms, performed by the group of Base Stations
Implementation of Middleware for Internet of Things in Asset Tracking Applications: In-lining Approach
ThesisInternet of Things (IoT) is a concept that involves giving objects a digital identity and limited
artificial intelligence, which helps the objects to be interactive, process data, make decisions,
communicate and react to events virtually with minimum human intervention. IoT is intensified
by advancements in hardware and software engineering and promises to close the gap that exists
between the physical and digital worlds. IoT is paving ways to address complex phenomena,
through designing and implementation of intelligent systems that can monitor phenomena,
perform real-time data interpretation, react to events, and swiftly communicate observations. The
primary goal of IoT is ubiquitous computing using wireless sensors and communication
protocols such as Bluetooth, Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), ZigBee and General Packet Radio
Service (GPRS).
Insecurity, of assets and lives, is a problem around the world. One application area of IoT is
tracking and monitoring; it could therefore be used to solve asset insecurity. A preliminary
investigation revealed that security systems in place at Central University of Technology, Free
State (CUT) are disjointed; they do not instantaneously and intelligently conscientize security
personnel about security breaches using real time messages. As a result, many assets have been
stolen, particularly laptops. The main objective of this research was to prove that a real-life application built over a generic
IoT architecture that innovatively and intelligently integrates: (1) wireless sensors; (2) radio
frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers; (3) fingerprint readers; and (4) mobile phones,
can be used to dispel laptop theft. To achieve this, the researcher developed a system, using the
heterogeneous devices mentioned above and a middleware that harnessed their unique
capabilities to bring out the full potential of IoT in intelligently curbing laptop theft.
The resulting system has the ability to: (1) monitor the presence of a laptop using RFID reader
that pro-actively interrogates a passive tag attached to the laptop; (2) detect unauthorized
removal of a laptop under monitoring; (3) instantly communicate security violations via cell
phones; and (4) use Windows location sensors to track the position of a laptop using Googlemaps.
The system also manages administrative tasks such as laptop registration, assignment and withdrawal which used to be handled manually. Experiments conducted using the resulting
system prototype proved the hypothesis outlined for this research
Conception et implémentation de systèmes résilients par une approche à composants
L'évolution des systèmes pendant leur vie opérationnelle est incontournable. Les systèmes sûrs de fonctionnement doivent évoluer pour s'adapter à des changements comme la confrontation à de nouveaux types de fautes ou la perte de ressources. L'ajout de cette dimension évolutive à la fiabilité conduit à la notion de résilience informatique. Parmi les différents aspects de la résilience, nous nous concentrons sur l'adaptativité. La sûreté de fonctionnement informatique est basée sur plusieurs moyens, dont la tolérance aux fautes à l'exécution, où l'on attache des mécanismes spécifiques (Fault Tolerance Mechanisms, FTMs) à l'application. A ce titre, l'adaptation des FTMs à l'exécution s'avère un défi pour développer des systèmes résilients. Dans la plupart des travaux de recherche existants, l'adaptation des FTMs à l'exécution est réalisée de manière préprogrammée ou se limite à faire varier quelques paramètres. Tous les FTMs envisageables doivent être connus dès le design du système et déployés et attachés à l'application dès le début. Pourtant, les changements ont des origines variées et, donc, vouloir équiper un système pour le pire scénario est impossible. Selon les observations pendant la vie opérationnelle, de nouveaux FTMs peuvent être développés hors-ligne, mais intégrés pendant l'exécution. On dénote cette capacité comme adaptation agile, par opposition à l'adaptation préprogrammée. Dans cette thèse, nous présentons une approche pour développer des systèmes sûrs de fonctionnement flexibles dont les FTMs peuvent s'adapter à l'exécution de manière agile par des modifications à grain fin pour minimiser l'impact sur l'architecture initiale. D'abord, nous proposons une classification d'un ensemble de FTMs existants basée sur des critères comme le modèle de faute, les caractéristiques de l'application et les ressources nécessaires. Ensuite, nous analysons ces FTMs et extrayons un schéma d'exécution générique identifiant leurs parties communes et leurs points de variabilité. Après, nous démontrons les bénéfices apportés par les outils et les concepts issus du domaine du génie logiciel, comme les intergiciels réflexifs à base de composants, pour développer une librairie de FTMs adaptatifs à grain fin. Nous évaluons l'agilité de l'approche et illustrons son utilité à travers deux exemples d'intégration : premièrement, dans un processus de développement dirigé par le design pour les systèmes ubiquitaires et, deuxièmement, dans un environnement pour le développement d'applications pour des réseaux de capteurs. ABSTRACT : Evolution during service life is mandatory, particularly for long-lived systems. Dependable systems, which continuously deliver trustworthy services, must evolve to accommodate changes e.g., new fault tolerance requirements or variations in available resources. The addition of this evolutionary dimension to dependability leads to the notion of resilient computing. Among the various aspects of resilience, we focus on adaptivity. Dependability relies on fault tolerant computing at runtime, applications being augmented with fault tolerance mechanisms (FTMs). As such, on-line adaptation of FTMs is a key challenge towards resilience. In related work, on-line adaption of FTMs is most often performed in a preprogrammed manner or consists in tuning some parameters. Besides, FTMs are replaced monolithically. All the envisaged FTMs must be known at design time and deployed from the beginning. However, dynamics occurs along multiple dimensions and developing a system for the worst-case scenario is impossible. According to runtime observations, new FTMs can be developed off-line but integrated on-line. We denote this ability as agile adaption, as opposed to the preprogrammed one. In this thesis, we present an approach for developing flexible fault-tolerant systems in which FTMs can be adapted at runtime in an agile manner through fine-grained modifications for minimizing impact on the initial architecture. We first propose a classification of a set of existing FTMs based on criteria such as fault model, application characteristics and necessary resources. Next, we analyze these FTMs and extract a generic execution scheme which pinpoints the common parts and the variable features between them. Then, we demonstrate the use of state-of-the-art tools and concepts from the field of software engineering, such as component-based software engineering and reflective component-based middleware, for developing a library of fine-grained adaptive FTMs. We evaluate the agility of the approach and illustrate its usability throughout two examples of integration of the library: first, in a design-driven development process for applications in pervasive computing and, second, in a toolkit for developing applications for WSNs
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