Characterization of Band Codes for Pollution-Resilient Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming

We provide a comprehensive characterization of band codes (BC) as a resilient-by-design solution to pollution attacks in network coding (NC)-based peer-to-peer live video streaming. Consider one malicious node injecting bogus coded packets into the network: the recombinations at the nodes generate an avalanche of novel coded bogus packets. Therefore, the malicious node can cripple the communication by injecting into the network only a handful of polluted packets. Pollution attacks are typically addressed by identifying and isolating the malicious nodes from the network. Pollution detection is, however, not straightforward in NC as the nodes exchange coded packets. Similarly, malicious nodes identification is complicated by the ambiguity between malicious nodes and nodes that have involuntarily relayed polluted packets. This paper addresses pollution attacks through a radically different approach which relies on BCs. BCs are a family of rateless codes originally designed for controlling the NC decoding complexity in mobile applications. Here, we exploit BCs for the totally different purpose of recombining the packets at the nodes so to avoid that the pollution propagates by adaptively adjusting the coding parameters. Our streaming experiments show that BCs curb the propagation of the pollution and restore the quality of the distributed video stream

IDLP: an efficient intrusion detection and location-aware prevention mechanism for network coding-enabled mobile small cells

Mobile small cell technology is considered as a 5G enabling technology for delivering ubiquitous 5G services in a cost-effective and energy efficient manner. Moreover, Network Coding (NC) technology can be foreseen as a promising solution for the wireless network of mobile small cells to increase its throughput and improve its performance. However, NC-enabled mobile small cells are vulnerable to pollution attacks due to the inherent vulnerabilities of NC. Although there are several works on pollution attack detection, the attackers may continue to pollute packets in the next transmission of coded packets of the same generation from the source node to the destination nodes. Therefore, in this paper, we present an intrusion detection and location-aware prevention (IDLP) mechanism which does not only detect the polluted packets and drop them but also identify the attacker's exact location so as to block them and prevent packet pollution in the next transmissions. In the proposed IDLP mechanism, the detection and locating schemes are based on a null space-based homomorphic MAC scheme. However, the proposed IDLP mechanism is efficient because, in its initial phase (i.e., Phase 1), it is not needed to be applied to all mobile devices in order to protect the NC-enabled mobile small cells from the depletion of their resources. The proposed efficient IDLP mechanism has been implemented in Kodo, and its performance has been evaluated and compared with our previous IDPS scheme proposed in [1], in terms of computational complexity, communicational overhead, and successfully decoding probability as well

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

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

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 nodes� 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