A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Layered Security Approach for Mobile Computing

Mobile technology had been accepted to be a vital and important and advancing application to be made use of in facilitating our way of doing business, because of its mobility nature. This research focus on securing mobile computing devices using layered security approach in order to safeguard wireless network against any possible threat from unauthorized users from coming into the network. Five layered security levels was discussed in the literature review as an effective means of securing any wireless network from cyber terrorists attacks. The main objective of this research is to deploy Authentication and Access Control security measures under the Network layer security approach, which happens to be one of the steps involved in securing mobile computing devices using layered security approach. The methodology for the research was adopted from SDLC which include Planning, Analysis, Design, Implementation and Evaluation. Consequently, the findings of the research was hoped to motivate and encourage organizations to incorporate and deploy layered security approach in improving and enhancing their network security against any possible attacks from external mobile users

Intrusion Detection System (IDS) Techniques and Responses for Mobile Wireless Networks

In recent years, the rapidly expanding area of mobile and wireless computing applications was definitely redefined the concept of network security. Even though that wireless had opened a new and exiting world with its advancing technology it is no doubt that it is popularity is on the rise. However, the biggest concern with either wireless or mobile computing applications in security. It can no longer be effective in the traditional way of securing networks with the use of firewalls and even with the use of stronger encryption algorithm keys. The need to develop and research for new structures and methods to protect and define the wireless networks and the mobile computing applications is becoming more and more evident. In this report, we will conduct an in-depth analysis of the weaknesses of the wireless networks and hence proved why the use of an intrusion detection system is of great importance in securing the backbone of mobile computing field. This would also involve detecting anomalies in the mobile ad-hoc network including inconsistencies in the routing tables and activities on other layers

Risks and responsibilities in establishing a wireless network for an educational institution

A wireless network solution is generally implemented when the bounds of walls of buildings and the constraints of wires need to be broken. Wireless technologies provide the potential for freedom of mobility which is undoubtedly a convenience for organisations in today’s market. The security of a wireless network is crucial for data integrity, especially when the data is not secured by the insulation of wires. While data is being transferred across a wireless network, it is vulnerable. There is no room for error, neglect or ignorance from an organisation, as a breech of data integrity can be devastating for both businesses and institutions. Securing a wireless network needs to be treated as mandatory for educational institutions, and not just as best practice. With both legal and financial consequences for a breech of data integrity and the data protection act, education institutions need to realise the legal obligations and liabilities they face with respect to the sensitive data and information traversing their network

Optimisation of the key SOA parameters for amplification and switching

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are composed of small, low cost, resource-constrained computing nodes equipped with low power wireless transceivers. Generally, they are embedded in their environment to perform some specific monitoring and/or control function. Unlike wired networks that have dedicated routers for network connectivity and message forwarding, every node in a WSN can act as a router in a multi-hop network. A WSN can offer a cheap, applicationspecific solution in a variety of situations including military and disaster response scenarios, where other approaches are not viable. Due to their unattended nature and deployment in possibly hostile environmental conditions, there are many challenges in ensuring that a WSN is formed effectively and survives long enough to fulfil its function. Securing a WSN against attack is a particular challenge. Traditional encryption mechanisms are resource hungry and are not sufficient alone to provide a complete solution. This project is concerned with secure routing protocols. Formal methods are used to model and analyse the design of existing protocols and to demonstrate some previously unreported weaknesses

Does your wireless LAN have criminal intent?

All of the literature relating to wireless network security has focused on the flaws, newer alternatives and suggestions for securing the network. There is much speculation and anecdotal statements in relation to what can happen if a breach occurs, but this is mostly from a computer security perspective, and mostly expressed in terms of potential for financial loss. This paper examines the potential legal ramifications of failing to properly secure a wireless network. Several scenarios are examined within based on usage of wireless on the various category of attack. Legal opinion, backed up with case law, is provided for each scenario. Several examples are given for unauthorised use, with other aspects having potential for prosecution. The conclusion is that no matter whether you are a home user of wireless, a small to medium business or a large enterprise, there a legal as well as financial reasons to properly secure your wireless network

Practical security scheme design for resource-constrained wireless networks

The implementation of ubiquitous computing (or pervasive computing) can leverage various types of resource-constrained wireless networks such as wireless sensor networks and wireless personal area networks. These resource-constrained wireless networks are vulnerable to many malicious attacks that often cause leakage, alteration and destruction of critical information due to the insecurity of wireless communication and the tampers of devices. Meanwhile, the constraints of resources, the lack of centralized management, and the demands of mobility of these networks often make traditional security mechanisms inefficient or infeasible. So, the resource-constrained wireless networks pose new challenges for information assurance and call for practical, efficient and effective solutions. In this research, we focus on wireless sensor networks and aim at enhancing confidentiality, authenticity, availability and integrity, for wireless sensor networks. Particularly, we identify three important problems as our research targets: (1) key management for wireless sensor networks (for confidentiality), (2) filtering false data injection and DoS attacks in wireless sensor networks (for authenticity and availability), and (3) secure network coding (for integrity). We investigate a diversity of malicious attacks against wireless sensor networks and design a number of practical schemes for establishing pairwise keys between sensor nodes, filtering false data injection and DoS attacks, and securing network coding against pollution attacks for wireless sensor networks. Our contributions from this research are fourfold: (1) We give a taxonomy of malicious attacks for wireless sensor networks. (2) We design a group-based key management scheme using deployment knowledge for wireless sensor networks to establish pair-wise keys between sensor nodes. (3) We propose an en-route scheme for filtering false data injection and DoS attacks in wireless sensor networks. (4) We present two efficient schemes for securing normal and XOR network coding against pollution attacks. Simulation and experimental results show that our solutions outperform existing ones and are suitable for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks in terms of computation overhead, communication cost, memory requirement, and so on