Analysis and Optimization of Cryptographically Generated Addresses

The need for nodes to be able to generate their own address and verify those from others, without relying on a global trusted authority, is a well-known problem in networking. One popular technique for solving this problem is to use self-certifying addresses that are widely used and standardized; a prime example is cryptographically generated addresses (CGA). We re-investigate the attack models that can occur in practice and analyze the security of CGA-like schemes. As a result, an alternative protocol to CGA, called CGA++, is presented. This protocol eliminates several attacks applicable to CGA and increases the overall security. In many ways, CGA++ offers a nice alternative to CGA and can be used notably for future developments of the Internet Protocol version 6

A survey on subjecting electronic product code and non-ID objects to IP identification

Over the last decade, both research on the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-world IoT applications have grown exponentially. The IoT provides us with smarter cities, intelligent homes, and generally more comfortable lives. However, the introduction of these devices has led to several new challenges that must be addressed. One of the critical challenges facing interacting with IoT devices is to address billions of devices (things) around the world, including computers, tablets, smartphones, wearable devices, sensors, and embedded computers, and so on. This article provides a survey on subjecting Electronic Product Code and non-ID objects to IP identification for IoT devices, including their advantages and disadvantages thereof. Different metrics are here proposed and used for evaluating these methods. In particular, the main methods are evaluated in terms of their: (i) computational overhead, (ii) scalability, (iii) adaptability, (iv) implementation cost, and (v) whether applicable to already ID-based objects and presented in tabular format. Finally, the article proves that this field of research will still be ongoing, but any new technique must favorably offer the mentioned five evaluative parameters.Comment: 112 references, 8 figures, 6 tables, Journal of Engineering Reports, Wiley, 2020 (Open Access

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

Sécurité dans les réseaux mobiles de nouvelle génération

RÉSUMÉ Les réseaux de nouvelle génération visent à converger les réseaux fixes et mobiles hétérogènes afin d’offrir tous les services à travers un réseau coeur tout IP. Faisant parti du réseau d’accès mobile, un des principaux objectifs du réseau 4G est de permettre une relève ininterrompue entre les réseaux cellulaires et WIFI pour ainsi favoriser l’apprivoisement de services vidéo mobiles exigeant des critères de qualité de service très stricts à moindres coûts. Cependant, l’uniformisation du trafic au niveau de la couche réseau favorise sa centralisation à travers un réseau coeur IP partagé par tous les opérateurs, la rendant ainsi comme une cible vulnérable de choix pour les pirates informatiques. La conception de solutions sécuritaires dans un environnement où les entités ne se connaissent pas à priori s’annonce comme une tâche très ardue. La thèse se penche sur quatre problématiques importantes dans les réseaux de nouvelle génération dont chacune est traitée dans un article distinct. Les deux premiers articles touchent à la sécurité dans un contexte décentralisé, à savoir les réseaux mobiles ad hoc (MANETs), alors que les deux derniers proposent des mécanismes innovateurs pour sécuriser des solutions visant à réduire la consommation de bande passante et d’énergie, en conformité avec le virage vert informatique promu par les opérateurs réseautiques. Plus précisément, le troisième article traite de la sécurisation des flots multicast dans un environnement à haut taux de perte de paquet et le dernier propose une solution d’optimisation de route sécuritaire pour mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) utilisant une version améliorée de l’algorithme de genération d’adresses cryptographiques (CGA) et les extensions de sécurité du système de nom de domaine (DNSSEC). Les systèmes de détection d’intrusion (IDS) pour les MANETs basés sur la réputation des noeuds classifient les participants du réseau selon leur degré de confiance. Cependant, ils partagent tous une vulnérabilité commune : l’impossibilité de détecter et de réagir aux attaques complices. Le premier article propose un IDS qui intègre efficacement le risque de collusion entre deux ou plusieurs noeuds malveillants dans le calcul de la fiabilité d’un chemin. L’algorithme propos´e ne se limite pas qu’au nombre et à la réputation des noeuds intermédiaires formant un chemin, mais intègre également d’autres informations pertinentes sur les voisins des noeuds intermédiaires d’un chemin pouvant superviser le message original et celui retransmis. Le IDS proposé détecte efficacement les noeuds malicieux et complices dans le but de les isoler rapidement du réseau. Les simulations lancées dans divers environnements MANETs contenant une proportion variable d’attaquants complices montrent bien l’efficacité du IDS proposée en offrant un gain en débit considérable comparativement aux solutions existantes. À l’instar de prévenir les comportements égoïstes des noeuds par la menace d’être privés de certaines fonctions, voire même isolés du réseau, due à une baisse de réputation, le second article opte pour un incitatif non-punitif en la monnaie virtuelle plus communément appelée nuglets. Plus précisément, l’article présente un cadre de travail issu de la théorie des jeux basé sur la compétition de Bertrand pour inciter les noeuds intermédiaires à retransmettre les messages selon les requis de QoS demandés par la source. Pour qu’un noeud source envoie ou accède à un flot sensible à la QoS comme par exemple les applications en temps réel, il débute par envoyer un contrat qui spécifie les critères de QoS, sa durée et son prix de réserve. Sur réception du contrat, les noeuds intermédiaires formant une route entre la source et la destination partagent les informations sur eux-mêmes et celles recueillies sur les noeuds voisins, anciens et courants pour estimer la probabilité de bris de contrat ainsi que le nombre de compétiteurs actifs. Ces deux paramètres sont cruciaux dans le processus de fixation des prix. Une fois les réponses de route recueillies, la source choisit la route la moins chère. Le cadre de travail multijoueur proposé, basé sur la compétition de Bertrand avec des firmes asymétriques et ayant accès à de l’information imparfaite, possède un équilibre de Nash en stratégies mixtes dans lequel le profit des firmes est positif et baisse non seulement avec le nombre de compétiteurs, mais aussi avec l’impression d’une précision accrue que les compétiteurs ont sur le coût de production du joueur. Les résultats montrent que l’incertitude sur les coûts augmente le taux de la marge brute et la fluctuation des prix tout en diminuant les chances d’honorer le contrat. Dans un autre ordre d’idée, l’intérêt sans cesse grandissant des opérateurs à converger les réseaux fixes et mobiles dans le but d’offrir une relève sans interruption favorise l’utilisation des applications vidéo mobiles qui surchargeront rapidement leurs réseaux. Dans un contexte du virage vert qui prend de plus en plus d’ampleur dans le domaine des télécommunications, la transmission des flots en multidiffusion (multicast) devient essentiel dans le but de réduire la consommation de bande passante et la congestion du réseau en rejoignant simultanément plusieurs destinataires. La sécurisation des flots en multidiffusion a été largement étudiée dans la littérature antérieure, cependant aucune des solutions proposées ne tient compte des contraintes imposées par les liaisons sans fil et la mobilité des noeuds, en particulier le haut taux de perte de paquets. La nécessité d’un mécanisme de distribution de clés régénératrices efficace et pouvant supporter un grand bassin d’abonnés pour les réseaux mobiles n’aura jamais été aussi urgent avec l’arrivée de la convergence fixe-mobile dans les réseaux 4G. Le troisième article présente deux algorithmes de clés régénératrices basés sur les chaînes de hachage bidirectionnelles pour le protocole de distribution de clés logical key hierarchy (LKH). Ainsi, un membre ayant perdu jusqu’à un certain nombre de clés de déchiffrement consécutives pourrait lui-même les régénérer sans faire la requête de retransmission au serveur de clés. Les simulations effectuées montrent que les algorithmes proposés offrent des améliorations considérables dans un environnement de réseau mobile à taux de perte de paquet, notamment dans le percentage de messages déchiffrés. Le souci d’efficacité énergétique est également présent pour les opérateurs de réseaux cellulaires. D’ailleurs, près de la moitié des abonnements sur Internet proviennent présentement d’unités mobiles et il est attendu que ce groupe d’utilisateurs deviennent le plus grand bassin d’usagers sur Internet dans la prochaine décennie. Pour supporter cette croissance rapide du nombre d’utilisateurs mobiles, le choix le plus naturel pour les opérateurs serait de remplacer mobile IPv4 par MIPv6. Or, la fonction d’optimisation de route (RO), qui remplace le routage triangulaire inefficace de MIP en permettant au noeud mobile (MN) une communication bidirectionnelle avec le noeud correspondant (CN) sans faire passer les messages à travers l’agent du réseau mère (HA), est déficiente au niveau de la sécurité. L’absence d’informations pré-partagées entre le MN et le CN rend la sécurisation du RO un défi de taille. MIPv6 adopte la routabilité de retour (RR) qui est davantage un mécanisme qui vérifie l’accessibilité du MN sur son adresse du réseau mère (HoA) et du réseau visité (CoA) plutôt qu’une fonction de sécurité. D’autres travaux se sont attaqués aux nombreuses failles de sécurité du RR, mais soit leur conception est fautive, soit leurs suppositions sont irréalistes. Le quatrième article présente une version améliorée de l’algorithme de génération cryptographique d’adresse (ECGA) pour MIPv6 qui intègre une chaîne de hachage arrière et offre de lier plusieurs adresses CGA ensemble. ECGA élimine les attaques de compromis temps-mémoire tout en étant efficace. Ce mécanisme de génération d’adresse fait parti du protocole Secure MIPv6 (SMIPv6) proposé avec un RO sécuritaire et efficace grâce à DNSSEC pour valider les CGAs qui proviennent d’un domaine de confiance et qui permet une authentification forte plutôt que l’invariance de source. Le vérificateur de protocoles cryptographiques dans le modèle formel AVISPA a été utilisé pour montrer qu’aucune faille de sécurité n’est présente tout en limitant au maximum les messages échangés dans le réseau d’accès. ----------ABSTRACT Next generation networks aim at offering all available services through an IP-core network by converging fixed-mobile heterogeneous networks. As part of the mobile access network, one of the main objectives of the 4G network is to provide seamless roaming with wireless local area networks and accommodating quality of service (QoS) specifications for digital video broadcasting systems. Such innovation aims expanding video-based digital services while reducing costs by normalizing the network layer through an all-IP architecture such as Internet. However, centralizing all traffic makes the shared core network a vulnerable target for attackers. Design security solutions in such an environment where entities a priori do not know each other represent a daunting task. This thesis tackles four important security issues in next generation networks each in distinct papers. The first two deal with security in decentralized mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) while the last two focus on securing solutions aiming at reducing bandwidth and energy consumption, in line with the green shift promoted by network operators. More precisely, the third paper is about protecting multicast flows in a packet-loss environment and the last one proposes a secure route optimization function in mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) using an enhanced version of cryptographically generated address (CGA) and domain name service security extensions (DNSSEC). Most intrusion detection systems (IDS) for MANETs are based on reputation system which classifies nodes according to their degree of trust. However, existing IDS all share the same major weakness: the failure to detect and react on colluding attacks. The first paper proposes an IDS that integrates the colluding risk factor into the computation of the path reliability which considers the number and the reputation of nodes that can compare both the source message and the retransmitted one. Also, the extended architecture effectively detects malicious and colluding nodes in order to isolate them and protect the network. The simulations launched in various MANETs containing various proportions of malicious and colluding nodes show that the proposed solution offers a considerable throughput gain compared to current solutions. By effectively selecting the most reliable route and by promptly detecting colluding attacks, the number of lost messages is decreased, and therefore, offering more efficient transmissions. Instead of thwarting selfishness in MANETs by threatening nodes to limit their network functions, the second paper opts for a non-punishment incentive by compensating nodes for their service through the use of virtual money, more commonly known as nuglets. The last paper presents a game-theoretic framework based on Bertrand competition to incite relaying nodes in forwarding messages according to QoS requirements. For a source to send or access QoS-sensitive flows, such as real-time applications, it starts by sending a contract specifying the QoS requirements, its duration and a reservation price. Upon receiving a contract submission, intermediary nodes forming a route between the source and the destination share their current and past collected information on themselves and on surrounding nodes to estimate the probability of breaching the contract and the number of active competitors. Both parameters are crucial in setting a price. Once the source gets the responses from various routes, it selects the most cheapest one. This multiplayer winner-takes-all framework based on Bertrand competition with firms having asymmetric costs and access imperfect information has a mixed-strategy equilibrium in which industry profits are positive and decline not only with the number of firms having an estimated cost below the reservation price but also with the perception of a greater accuracy on a player’s cost that competitors have. In fact,results show that cost uncertainty increases firms’ gross margin rate and the prices fluctuation while making the contract honoring much riskier. On another topic, with the growing interest in converging fixed and mobile networks, mobile applications will require more and more resources from both the network and the mobile device. In a social-motivated context of shifting into green technologies, using multicast transmissions is essential because it lowers bandwidth consumption by simultaneously reaching a group of multiple recipients. Securing multicast flows has been extensively studied in the past, but none of the existing solutions were meant to handle the constraints imposed by mobile scenarios, in particular the high packet-loss rate. The need for a low overhead selfhealing rekeying mechanism that is scalable, reliable and suitable for mobile environments has never been more urgent than with the arrival of fixed-mobile convergence in 4G networks. The second paper presents two self-healing recovery schemes based on the dual directional hash chains for the logical key hierarchy rekeying protocol. This enables a member that has missed up to m consecutive key updates to recover the missing decryption keys without asking the group controller key server for retransmission. Conducted simulations show considerable improvements in the ratio of decrypted messages and in the rekey message overhead in high packet loss environments. The concern of energy efficiency is also present for mobile access network operators. In fact, nearly half of all Internet subscribers come from mobile units at the moment and it is expected to be the largest pool of Internet users by the next decade. The most obvious choice for mobile operators to support more users would be to replace Mobile IP for IPv4 with MIPv6. However, the Route Optimization (RO) function, which replaces the inefficient triangle routing by allowing a bidirectional communication between a mobile node (MN) and the corresponding node (CN) without passing through its home agent (HA), is not secure and has a high overhead. The lack of pre-shared information between the MN and the CN makes security in RO a difficult challenge. MIPv6 adopts the return routability (RR) mechanism which is more to verify the MN reachability in both its home address (HoA) and care-of address (CoA) than a security feature. Other works attempted to solve the multiple security issues in RR but either their design are flawed, or rely on unrealistic assumptions. The third paper presents an enhanced cryptographically generated address (ECGA) for MIPv6 that integrates a built-in backward key chain and offers support to bind multiple logically-linked CGAs together. ECGA tackles the time-memory tradeoff attacks while being very efficient. It is part of the proposed secure MIPv6 (SMIPv6) with secure and efficient RO which uses DNSSEC to validate CGAs from trusted domains and provide strong authentication rather than sender invariance. The AVISPA on-the-fly model checker (OFMC) tool has been used to show that the proposed solution has no security flaws while still being lightweight in signalling messages in the radio network

Temporal and Spatial Classification of Active IPv6 Addresses

There is striking volume of World-Wide Web activity on IPv6 today. In early 2015, one large Content Distribution Network handles 50 billion IPv6 requests per day from hundreds of millions of IPv6 client addresses; billions of unique client addresses are observed per month. Address counts, however, obscure the number of hosts with IPv6 connectivity to the global Internet. There are numerous address assignment and subnetting options in use; privacy addresses and dynamic subnet pools significantly inflate the number of active IPv6 addresses. As the IPv6 address space is vast, it is infeasible to comprehensively probe every possible unicast IPv6 address. Thus, to survey the characteristics of IPv6 addressing, we perform a year-long passive measurement study, analyzing the IPv6 addresses gleaned from activity logs for all clients accessing a global CDN. The goal of our work is to develop flexible classification and measurement methods for IPv6, motivated by the fact that its addresses are not merely more numerous; they are different in kind. We introduce the notion of classifying addresses and prefixes in two ways: (1) temporally, according to their instances of activity to discern which addresses can be considered stable; (2) spatially, according to the density or sparsity of aggregates in which active addresses reside. We present measurement and classification results numerically and visually that: provide details on IPv6 address use and structure in global operation across the past year; establish the efficacy of our classification methods; and demonstrate that such classification can clarify dimensions of the Internet that otherwise appear quite blurred by current IPv6 addressing practices

Enabling individually entrusted routing security for open and decentralized community networks

Routing in open and decentralized networks relies on cooperation. However, the participation of unknown nodes and node administrators pursuing heterogeneous trust and security goals is a challenge. Community-mesh networks are good examples of such environments due to their open structure, decentralized management, and ownership. As a result, existing community networks are vulnerable to various attacks and are seriously challenged by the obligation to find consensus on the trustability of participants within an increasing user size and diversity. We propose a practical and novel solution enabling a secured but decentralized trust management. This work presents the design and analysis of securely-entrusted multi-topology routing (SEMTOR), a set of routing-protocol mechanisms that enable the cryptographically secured negotiation and establishment of concurrent and individually trusted routing topologies for infrastructure-less networks without relying on any central management. The proposed mechanisms have been implemented, tested, and evaluated for their correctness and performance to exclude non-trusted nodes from the network. Respective safety and liveness properties that are guaranteed by our protocol have been identified and proven with formal reasoning. Benchmarking results, based on our implementation as part of the BMX7 routing protocol and tested on real and minimal (OpenWRT, 10 Euro) routers, qualify the behaviour, performance, and scalability of our approach, supporting networks with hundreds of nodes despite the use of strong asymmetric cryptography.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Security for Decentralised Service Location - Exemplified with Real-Time Communication Session Establishment

Decentralised Service Location, i.e. finding an application communication endpoint based on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT), is a fairly new concept. The precise security implications of this approach have not been studied in detail. More importantly, a detailed analysis regarding the applicability of existing security solutions to this concept has not been conducted. In many cases existing client-server approaches to security may not be feasible. In addition, to understand the necessity for such an analysis, it is key to acknowledge that Decentralised Service Location has some unique security requirements compared to other P2P applications such as filesharing or live streaming. This thesis concerns the security challenges for Decentralised Service Location. The goals of our work are on the one hand to precisely understand the security requirements and research challenges for Decentralised Service Location, and on the other hand to develop and evaluate corresponding security mechanisms. The thesis is organised as follows. First, fundamentals are explained and the scope of the thesis is defined. Decentralised Service Location is defined and P2PSIP is explained technically as a prototypical example. Then, a security analysis for P2PSIP is presented. Based on this security analysis, security requirements for Decentralised Service Location and the corresponding research challenges -- i.e. security concerns not suitably mitigated by existing solutions -- are derived. Second, several decentralised solutions are presented and evaluated to tackle the security challenges for Decentralised Service Location. We present decentralised algorithms to enable availability of the DHTs lookup service in the presence of adversary nodes. These algorithms are evaluated via simulation and compared to analytical bounds. Further, a cryptographic approach based on self-certifying identities is illustrated and discussed. This approach enables decentralised integrity protection of location-bindings. Finally, a decentralised approach to assess unknown identities is introduced. The approach is based on a Web-of-Trust model. It is evaluated via prototypical implementation. Finally, the thesis closes with a summary of the main contributions and a discussion of open issues

Securing home and correspondent registrations in mobile IPv6 networks

The Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) protocol enables mobile nodes (MNs) to remain connected to other correspondent nodes (CNs) while roaming the IPv6 Internet. Home and correspondent registrations are essential parts of the MIPv6 protocol, whereby MNs register their care-of addresses (CoAs) with their home agents (HAs) and with their CNs, respectively. Security provision for home and correspondent registrations is a fundamental part of the MIPv6 protocol and has been an open research issue since the early stages of the protocol.This thesis examines state-of-the-art protocols for securing home and correspondent registrations in MIPv6 networks. The strengths and weaknesses of these protocols are discussed. The investigation of these protocols leads to the proposal of an enhanced home registration protocol and a family of correspondent registration protocols. The Enhanced Home Registration (EHR) protocol extends the basic home registration protocol defined in MIPv6 to support the location authentication of MNs to their HAs. The EHR is based on novel ideas of segmenting the IPv6 address space, using a symmetric CGA-based technique for generating CoAs, and applying concurrent CoAs reachability tests. As a result, EHR is able to reduce the likelihood of a malicious MN being successful in luring an HA to flood a third party with useless packets using MIPv6. In addition, EHR enables HAs to help in correspondent registrations by confirming MNs' CoAs to CNs. Simulation studies of EHR have shown that it only introduces a marginal increase in the registration delay, but a significant increase in the signalling overhead as a cost of supporting the location authentication of MNs.The thesis also proposes a family of correspondent registration protocols. These protocols rely on the assistance of home networks to confirm the MNs' ownership of the claimed HoAs and CoAs. The protocols consist of three phases: a creation phase, an update phase and a deletion phase. Informal and formal protocol analyses have confirmed the protocols' correctness and satisfaction of the required security properties. The protocols have been simulated extensively and the results show that they produce lower registration delay and a reduction in the signalling overhead during update and deletion phases. This is at the cost of a varying increase, depending on the protocol variant, in the registration delay and signalling overhead during the creation phase.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceEgyptian GovernmentGBUnited Kingdo

An investigation into Off-Link IPv6 host enumeration search methods

This research investigated search methods for enumerating networked devices on off-link 64 bit Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) subnetworks. IPv6 host enumeration is an emerging research area involving strategies to enable detection of networked devices on IPv6 networks. Host enumeration is an integral component in vulnerability assessments (VAs), and can be used to strengthen the security profile of a system. Recently, host enumeration has been applied to Internet-wide VAs in an effort to detect devices that are vulnerable to specific threats. These host enumeration exercises rely on the fact that the existing Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) can be exhaustively enumerated in less than an hour. The same is not true for IPv6, which would take over 584,940 years to enumerate a single network. As such, research is required to determine appropriate host enumeration search methods for IPv6, given that the protocol is seeing increase global usage. For this study, a survey of Internet resources was conducted to gather information about the nature of IPv6 usage in real-world scenarios. The collected survey data revealed patterns in the usage of IPv6 that influenced search techniques. The research tested the efficacy of various searching algorithms against IPv6 datasets through the use of simulation. Multiple algorithms were devised to test different approaches to host enumeration against 64 bit IPv6 subnetworks. Of these, a novel adaptive heuristic search algorithm, a genetic algorithm and a stripe search algorithm were chosen to conduct off-link IPv6 host enumeration. The suitability of a linear algorithm, a Monte Carlo algorithm and a pattern heuristics algorithm were also tested for their suitability in searching off-link IPv6 networks. These algorithms were applied to two test IPv6 address datasets, one comprised of unique IPv6 data observed during the survey phase, and one comprised of unique IPv6 data generated using pseudorandom number generators. Searching against the two unique datasets was performed in order to determine appropriate strategies for off-link host enumeration under circumstances where networked devices were configured with addresses that represented real-word IPv6 addresses, and where device addresses were configured through some randomisation function. Whilst the outcomes of this research support that an exhaustive enumeration of an IPv6 network is infeasible, it has been demonstrated that devices on IPv6 networks can be enumerated. In particular, it was identified that the linear search technique and the variants tested in this study (pattern search and stripe search), remained the most consistent means of enumerating an IPv6 network. Machine learning methods were also successfully applied to the problem. It was determined that the novel adaptive heuristic search algorithm was an appropriate candidate for search operations. The adaptive heuristic search algorithm successfully enumerated over 24% of the available devices on the dataset that was crafted from surveyed IPv6 address data. Moreover, it was confirmed that stochastic address generation can reduce the effectiveness of enumeration strategies, as all of the algorithms failed to enumerate more than 1% of hosts against a pseudorandomly generated dataset. This research highlights a requirement for effective IPv6 host enumeration algorithms, and presents and validates appropriate methods. The methods presented in this thesis can help to influence the tools and utilities that are used to conduct host enumeration exercises