6,542 research outputs found
A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in
the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed
nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks
are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their
proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed
for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield.
Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios.
Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security
mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible
in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging
task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms
for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures
presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN
security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table
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
Trusted Computing and Secure Virtualization in Cloud Computing
Large-scale deployment and use of cloud computing in industry
is accompanied and in the same time hampered by concerns regarding protection of
data handled by cloud computing providers. One of the consequences of moving
data processing and storage off company premises is that organizations have
less control over their infrastructure. As a result, cloud service (CS) clients
must trust that the CS provider is able to protect their data and
infrastructure from both external and internal attacks. Currently however, such
trust can only rely on organizational processes declared by the CS
provider and can not be remotely verified and validated by an external party.
Enabling the CS client to verify the integrity of the host where the
virtual machine instance will run, as well as to ensure that the virtual
machine image has not been tampered with, are some steps towards building
trust in the CS provider. Having the tools to perform such
verifications prior to the launch of the VM instance allows the CS
clients to decide in runtime whether certain data should be stored- or calculations
should be made on the VM instance offered by the CS provider.
This thesis combines three components -- trusted computing, virtualization technology
and cloud computing platforms -- to address issues of trust and
security in public cloud computing environments. Of the three components,
virtualization technology has had the longest evolution and is a cornerstone
for the realization of cloud computing. Trusted computing is a recent
industry initiative that aims to implement the root of trust in a hardware
component, the trusted platform module. The initiative has been formalized
in a set of specifications and is currently at version 1.2. Cloud computing
platforms pool virtualized computing, storage and network resources in
order to serve a large number of customers customers that use a multi-tenant
multiplexing model to offer on-demand self-service over broad network.
Open source cloud computing platforms are, similar to trusted computing, a
fairly recent technology in active development.
The issue of trust in public cloud environments is addressed
by examining the state of the art within cloud computing security and
subsequently addressing the issues of establishing trust in the launch of a
generic virtual machine in a public cloud environment. As a result, the thesis
proposes a trusted launch protocol that allows CS clients
to verify and ensure the integrity of the VM instance at launch time, as
well as the integrity of the host where the VM instance is launched. The protocol
relies on the use of Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for key generation and data protection.
The TPM also plays an essential part in the integrity attestation of the
VM instance host. Along with a theoretical, platform-agnostic protocol,
the thesis also describes a detailed implementation design of the protocol
using the OpenStack cloud computing platform.
In order the verify the implementability of the proposed protocol, a prototype
implementation has built using a distributed deployment of OpenStack.
While the protocol covers only the trusted launch procedure using generic
virtual machine images, it presents a step aimed to contribute towards
the creation of a secure and trusted public cloud computing environment
Collusion in Peer-to-Peer Systems
Peer-to-peer systems have reached a widespread use, ranging from academic and industrial applications to home entertainment. The key advantage of this paradigm lies in its scalability and flexibility, consequences of the participants sharing their resources for the common welfare. Security in such systems is a desirable goal. For example, when mission-critical operations or bank transactions are involved, their effectiveness strongly depends on the perception that users have about the system dependability and trustworthiness. A major threat to the security of these systems is the phenomenon of collusion. Peers can be selfish colluders, when they try to fool the system to gain unfair advantages over other peers, or malicious, when their purpose is to subvert the system or disturb other users. The problem, however, has received so far only a marginal attention by the research community. While several solutions exist to counter attacks in peer-to-peer systems, very few of them are meant to directly counter colluders and their attacks. Reputation, micro-payments, and concepts of game theory are currently used as the main means to obtain fairness in the usage of the resources. Our goal is to provide an overview of the topic by examining the key issues involved. We measure the relevance of the problem in the current literature and the effectiveness of existing philosophies against it, to suggest fruitful directions in the further development of the field
A survey on cyber security for smart grid communications
A smart grid is a new form of electricity network with high fidelity power-flow control, self-healing, and energy reliability and energy security using digital communications and control technology. To upgrade an existing power grid into a smart grid, it requires significant dependence on intelligent and secure communication infrastructures. It requires security frameworks for distributed communications, pervasive computing and sensing technologies in smart grid. However, as many of the communication technologies currently recommended to use by a smart grid is vulnerable in cyber security, it could lead to unreliable system operations, causing unnecessary expenditure, even consequential disaster to both utilities and consumers. In this paper, we summarize the cyber security requirements and the possible vulnerabilities in smart grid communications and survey the current solutions on cyber security for smart grid communications. © 2012 IEEE
Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks
This chapter discusses the need of security and privacy protection mechanisms
in aggregation protocols used in wireless sensor networks (WSN). It presents a
comprehensive state of the art discussion on the various privacy protection
mechanisms used in WSNs and particularly focuses on the CPDA protocols proposed
by He et al. (INFOCOM 2007). It identifies a security vulnerability in the CPDA
protocol and proposes a mechanism to plug that vulnerability. To demonstrate
the need of security in aggregation process, the chapter further presents
various threats in WSN aggregation mechanisms. A large number of existing
protocols for secure aggregation in WSN are discussed briefly and a protocol is
proposed for secure aggregation which can detect false data injected by
malicious nodes in a WSN. The performance of the protocol is also presented.
The chapter concludes while highlighting some future directions of research in
secure data aggregation in WSNs.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, 3 table
CONSTRUCTION OF EFFICIENT AUTHENTICATION SCHEMES USING TRAPDOOR HASH FUNCTIONS
In large-scale distributed systems, where adversarial attacks can have widespread impact, authentication provides protection from threats involving impersonation of entities and tampering of data. Practical solutions to authentication problems in distributed systems must meet specific constraints of the target system, and provide a reasonable balance between security and cost. The goal of this dissertation is to address the problem of building practical and efficient authentication mechanisms to secure distributed applications. This dissertation presents techniques to construct efficient digital signature schemes using trapdoor hash functions for various distributed applications. Trapdoor hash functions are collision-resistant hash functions associated with a secret trapdoor key that allows the key-holder to find collisions between hashes of different messages. The main contributions of this dissertation are as follows:
1. A common problem with conventional trapdoor hash functions is that revealing a collision producing message pair allows an entity to compute additional collisions without knowledge of the trapdoor key. To overcome this problem, we design an efficient trapdoor hash function that prevents all entities except the trapdoor key-holder from computing collisions regardless of whether collision producing message pairs are revealed by the key-holder.
2. We design a technique to construct efficient proxy signatures using trapdoor hash functions to authenticate and authorize agents acting on behalf of users in agent-based computing systems. Our technique provides agent authentication, assurance of agreement between delegator and agent, security without relying on secure communication channels and control over an agent’s capabilities.
3. We develop a trapdoor hash-based signature amortization technique for authenticating real-time, delay-sensitive streams. Our technique provides independent verifiability of blocks comprising a stream, minimizes sender-side and receiver-side delays, minimizes communication overhead, and avoids transmission of redundant information.
4. We demonstrate the practical efficacy of our trapdoor hash-based techniques for signature amortization and proxy signature construction by presenting discrete log-based instantiations of the generic techniques that are efficient to compute, and produce short signatures.
Our detailed performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed schemes outperform existing schemes in computation cost and signature size. We also present proofs for security of the proposed discrete-log based instantiations against forgery attacks under the discrete-log assumption
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