Secure positioning in wireless networks

So far, the problem of positioning in wireless networks has been studied mainly in a nonadversarial setting. In this paper, we analyze the resistance of positioning techniques to position and distance spoofing attacks. We propose a mechanism for secure positioning of wireless devices, that we call verifiable multilateration. We then show how this mechanism can be used to secure positioning in sensor networks. We analyze our system through simulations

Security in Mobile Networks: Communication and Localization

Nowadays the mobile networks are everywhere. The world is becoming more dependent on wireless and mobile services, but the rapid growth of these technologies usually underestimates security aspects. As wireless and mobile services grow, weaknesses in network infrastructures become clearer. One of the problems is privacy. Wireless technologies can reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and make important information more readily and widely available. But, there are also risks. Without appropriate safeguards, these data can be read and modified by unauthorized users. There are many solutions, less and more effective, to protect the data from unauthorized users. But, a specific application could distinguish more data flows between authorized users. Protect the privacy of these information between subsets of users is not a trivial problem. Another problem is the reliability of the wireless service. Multi-vehicle systems composed of Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are largely used for industrial transportation in manufacturing and logistics systems. These vehicles use a mobile wireless network to exchange information in order to coordinate their tasks and movements. The reliable dissemination of these information is a crucial operation, because the AGVs may achieve an inconsistent view of the system leading to the failure of the coordination task. This has clear safety implications. Going more in deep, even if the communication are confidential and reliable, anyway the positioning information could be corrupted. Usually, vehicles get the positioning information through a secondary wireless network system such as GPS. Nevertheless, the widespread civil GPS is extremely fragile in adversarial scenarios. An insecure distance or position estimation could produce security problems such as unauthorized accesses, denial of service, thefts, integrity disruption with possible safety implications and intentional disasters. In this dissertation, we face these three problems, proposing an original solution for each one

Location reliability and gamification mechanisms for mobile crowd sensing

People-centric sensing with smart phones can be used for large scale sensing of the physical world by leveraging the sensors on the phones. This new type of sensing can be a scalable and cost-effective alternative to deploying static wireless sensor networks for dense sensing coverage across large areas. However, mobile people-centric sensing has two main issues: 1) Data reliability in sensed data and 2) Incentives for participants. To study these issues, this dissertation designs and develops McSense, a mobile crowd sensing system which provides monetary and social incentives to users. This dissertation proposes and evaluates two protocols for location reliability as a step toward achieving data reliability in sensed data, namely, ILR (Improving Location Reliability) and LINK (Location authentication through Immediate Neighbors Knowledge). ILR is a scheme which improves the location reliability of mobile crowd sensed data with minimal human efforts based on location validation using photo tasks and expanding the trust to nearby data points using periodic Bluetooth scanning. LINK is a location authentication protocol working independent of wireless carriers, in which nearby users help authenticate each other’s location claims using Bluetooth communication. The results of experiments done on Android phones show that the proposed protocols are capable of detecting a significant percentage of the malicious users claiming false location. Furthermore, simulations with the LINK protocol demonstrate that LINK can effectively thwart a number of colluding user attacks. This dissertation also proposes a mobile sensing game which helps collect crowd sensing data by incentivizing smart phone users to play sensing games on their phones. We design and implement a first person shooter sensing game, “Alien vs. Mobile User”, which employs techniques to attract users to unpopular regions. The user study results show that mobile gaming can be a successful alternative to micro-payments for fast and efficient area coverage in crowd sensing. It is observed that the proposed game design succeeds in achieving good player engagement

Secure location-aware communications in energy-constrained wireless networks

Wireless ad hoc network has enabled a variety of exciting civilian, industrial and military applications over the past few years. Among the many types of wireless ad hoc networks, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has gained popularity because of the technology development for manufacturing low-cost, low-power, multi-functional motes. Compared with traditional wireless network, location-aware communication is a very common communication pattern and is required by many applications in WSNs. For instance, in the geographical routing protocol, a sensor needs to know its own and its neighbors\u27 locations to forward a packet properly to the next hop. The application-aware communications are vulnerable to many malicious attacks, ranging from passive eavesdropping to active spoofing, jamming, replaying, etc. Although research efforts have been devoted to secure communications in general, the properties of energy-constrained networks pose new technical challenges: First, the communicating nodes in the network are always unattended for long periods without physical maintenance, which makes their energy a premier resource. Second, the wireless devices usually have very limited hardware resources such as memory, computation capacity and communication range. Third, the number of nodes can be potentially of very high magnitude. Therefore, it is infeasible to utilize existing secure algorithms designed for conventional wireless networks, and innovative mechanisms should be designed in a way that can conserve power consumption, use inexpensive hardware and lightweight protocols, and accommodate with the scalability of the network. In this research, we aim at constructing a secure location-aware communication system for energy-constrained wireless network, and we take wireless sensor network as a concrete research scenario. Particularly, we identify three important problems as our research targets: (1) providing correct location estimations for sensors in presence of wormhole attacks and pollution attacks, (2) detecting location anomalies according to the application-specific requirements of the verification accuracy, and (3) preventing information leakage to eavesdroppers when using network coding for multicasting location information. Our contributions of the research are as follows: First, we propose two schemes to improve the availability and accuracy of location information of nodes. Then, we study monitoring and detection techniques and propose three lightweight schemes to detect location anomalies. Finally, we propose two network coding schemes which can effectively prevent information leakage to eavesdroppers. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our schemes in enhancing security of the system. Compared to previous works, our schemes are more lightweight in terms of hardware cost, computation overhead and communication consumptions, and thus are suitable for energy-constrained wireless networks

Improving Performance of WSN Based On Hybrid Range Based Approach

Improving the performance of WSN supported hybrid range based approach. WSN is self-possessed minimization error of nodes prepared with limited resources, limited memory and computational abilities. WSNs reliably work in unidentified hubs and numerous situations, it's difficult to trade sensor hubs after deployment, and therefore a fundamental objective is to optimize the sensor nodes' lifetime. A WSN may be a set of a large number of resource-constrained sensor nodes which have abilities for information detection, processing, and short-range radio communication, Analysis localization error minimization based several applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN) need data regarding the geographical location of each detector node. Self-organization and localization capabilities are one in every of the foremost necessary needs in detector networks. It provides a summary of centralized distance-based algorithms for estimating the positions of nodes during very sensing nodes. Secure localization of unknown nodes during a very wireless detector network (WSN) may be a vital analysis subject wireless sensor networks (WSN), a component of enveloping computing, are presently getting used on a large scale to look at period environmental standing, Be that as it may, these sensors work underneath extraordinary vitality imperatives and are planned by remembering an application. Proposed approaches are sensing node location and challenging task, involve assessing sort of various parameters needed by the target application. In study realize drawback not sense positioning of nodes .but proposed approach formula recognizes the optimal location of nodes supported minimize error and best answer in WSN. Localization algorithms mentioned with their benefits and disadvantages. Lastly, a comparative study of localization algorithms supported the performance in WSN. This was often done primarily to offer a summary of the proposed approach known today for reliable data and minimizing the energy consumption in wireless sensor networks

Detection performance and mitigation techniques in CR networks

Pervasive wireless communications rely enormously on spectrum utilization; the increase in demand for new wireless services and their application has led to spectrum scarcity. Spectrum limitations can be resolved by cognitive radio (CR) which is a technology that allows secondary users (SUs) to use the spectrum when it is not occupied by primary users (PUs). In this thesis, the security issues that decrease CR performance are discussed; there are two major threats i.e. primary user emulation attack (PUEA) and spectrum sensing data falsification attack (SSDF). Firstly, the CR network (CRN) is simulated whereby PUs and SUs are presented in the system with the presence of multiple malicious users that are randomly located within a circle of radius (R). The simulation results, based on an analytical model, show that the false alarm probability is significantly affected by the network radius Rand malicious users' number, and it is proved that there is a range of R over which the PUEAs are most successful. Secondly, a transmitter verification scheme (direct scheme) and indirect trust scheme that considers the users' history are presented; the results proved that if the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is raised, correspondingly the t:rnstworthiness of the PU is considerably increased. Based on these two schemes, the trnstworthiness of the PU is much higher than that of the malicious user and because the indirect scheme considers the historical behaviour of the user, it improves the user's trustworthiness.Finally, cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) approaches are proposed, namely, a trust based approach, a punishment based approach and a dedicated punishment based approach. It is proved that these proposed CSS approaches outperform the traditional majority scheme despite a high number of malicious users. In addition, the dedicated punishment approaches which punish only the malicious users outperform the other approaches