A network access control framework for 6LoWPAN networks

Low power over wireless personal area networks (LoWPAN), in particular wireless sensor networks, represent an emerging technology with high potential to be employed in critical situations like security surveillance, battlefields, smart-grids, and in e-health applications. The support of security services in LoWPAN is considered a challenge. First, this type of networks is usually deployed in unattended environments, making them vulnerable to security attacks. Second, the constraints inherent to LoWPAN, such as scarce resources and limited battery capacity, impose a careful planning on how and where the security services should be deployed. Besides protecting the network from some well-known threats, it is important that security mechanisms be able to withstand attacks that have not been identified before. One way of reaching this goal is to control, at the network access level, which nodes can be attached to the network and to enforce their security compliance. This paper presents a network access security framework that can be used to control the nodes that have access to the network, based on administrative approval, and to enforce security compliance to the authorized nodes

Secure Data Provenance in Home Energy Monitoring Networks

Smart grid empowers home owners to efficiently manage their smart home appliances within a Home Area Network (HAN), by real time monitoring and fine-grained control. However, it offers the possibility for a malicious user to intrude into the HAN and deceive the smart metering system with fraudulent energy usage report. While most of the existing works have focused on how to prevent data tampering in HAN's communication channel, this paper looks into a relatively less studied security aspect namely data provenance. We propose a novel solution based on Shamir's secret sharing and threshold cryptography to guarantee that the reported energy usage is collected from the specific appliance as claimed at a particular location, and that it reflects the real consumption of the energy. A byproduct of the proposed security solution is a guarantee of data integrity. A prototype implementation is presented to demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of the proposed solution

Survey on Security Management of Multiple Spoofing Attackers in Wireless Networks

Wireless spoofing attacks are simple to introduce and can importantly impact the performance of networks. In this paper, we propose to use spatial information a physical property related to every node, complex to mispresent and self reliant on cryptography, as the initializing for detecting spoofing attacks determining the number of attackers when multiple opponent masquerading as the same node identity and localizing multiple adversaries We propose to use the spatial correlation of received signal strength (RSS) inherited from wireless nodes to detect the spoofing attacks. For determining the number of attackers we are using cluster based mechanism. To localize the positions of multiple attackers, we have developed an integrated detection and localization system. The generated localization results with a representative set of algorithms provide strong evidence of high accuracy of localizing multiple adversaries. As the wireless networks are easily susceptible for various types of spoofing attacks, basically this paper focuses on Identity-based spoofing attacks and the enhanced and efficient techniques to secure from such attacks

Cluster Based Intrusion Detection Technique for Wireless Networks

Wireless networks are vulnerable to spoofing attacks, which allows for many other forms of attacks on the networks. Although th e identity of a node can be verified through cryptographic authentication, authentication is not always possible because it requires key management and additional infrastructural overhead. In this paper we propose a method for both detect ing spoofing attacks, as well as locating the positions of adversaries performing the attacks. We propose to use the spatial correlation of received signal strength (RSS) inherited from wireless nodes to detect the spoofing attacks. We then formulate the problem of determin ing the number of attackers as a multiclass detection problem. Cluster - based mechanisms are developed to determine the number of attackers. When the training data are available, we explore using the Support Vector Machines (SVM) method to further improve t he accuracy of determining the number of attackers. In addition, we developed an integrated detection and localization system that can localize the positions of multiple attackers. We evaluated our techniques through two test beds using both an 802.11 ( Wi - Fi ) network and an 802.15.4 network in two real office buildings. Our experimental results show that our proposed methods can achieve over 90 percent Hit Rate and Precision when determining the number of attackers. Our localizatio n results using a represen tative set of algorithms provide strong evidence of high accuracy of localizing multiple adversaries

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

A lightweight and secure multilayer authentication scheme for wireless body area networks in healthcare system

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have lately been combined with different healthcare equipment to monitor patients' health status and communicate information with their healthcare practitioners. Since healthcare data often contain personal and sensitive information, it is important that healthcare systems have a secure way for users to log in and access resources and services. The lack of security and presence of anonymous communication in WBANs can cause their operational failure. There are other systems in this area, but they are vulnerable to offline identity guessing attacks, impersonation attacks in sensor nodes, and spoofing attacks in hub node. Therefore, this study provides a secure approach that overcomes these issues while maintaining comparable efficiency in wireless sensor nodes and mobile phones. To conduct the proof of security, the proposed scheme uses the Scyther tool for formal analysis and the Canetti–Krawczyk (CK) model for informal analysis. Furthermore, the suggested technique outperforms the existing symmetric and asymmetric encryption-based schemes