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

Enhancing multi-source content delivery in content-centric networks with fountain coding

Fountain coding has been considered as especially suitable for lossy environments, such as wireless networks, as it provides redundancy while reducing coordination overheads between sender(s) and receiver(s). As such it presents beneficial properties for multi-source and/or multicast communication. In this paper we investigate enhancing/increasing multi-source content delivery efficiency in the context of Content-Centric Networking (CCN) with the usage of fountain codes. In particular, we examine whether the combination of fountain coding with the in-network caching capabilities of CCN can further improve performance. We also present an enhancement of CCN's Interest forwarding mechanism that aims at minimizing duplicate transmissions that may occur in a multi-source transmission scenario, where all available content providers and caches with matching (cached) content transmit data packets simultaneously. Our simulations indicate that the use of fountain coding in CCN is a valid approach that further increases network performance compared to traditional schemes

Secure Identification in Social Wireless Networks

The applications based on social networking have brought revolution towards social life and are continuously gaining popularity among the Internet users. Due to the advanced computational resources offered by the innovative hardware and nominal subscriber charges of network operators, most of the online social networks are transforming into the mobile domain by offering exciting applications and games exclusively designed for users on the go. Moreover, the mobile devices are considered more personal as compared to their desktop rivals, so there is a tendency among the mobile users to store sensitive data like contacts, passwords, bank account details, updated calendar entries with key dates and personal notes on their devices. The Project Social Wireless Network Secure Identification (SWIN) is carried out at Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) to explore the practicality of providing the secure mobile social networking portal with advanced security features to tackle potential security threats by extending the existing methods with more innovative security technologies. In addition to the extensive background study and the determination of marketable use-cases with their corresponding security requirements, this thesis proposes a secure identification design to satisfy the security dimensions for both online and offline peers. We have implemented an initial prototype using PHP Socket and OpenSSL library to simulate the secure identification procedure based on the proposed design. The design is in compliance with 3GPP‟s Generic Authentication Architecture (GAA) and our implementation has demonstrated the flexibility of the solution to be applied independently for the applications requiring secure identification. Finally, the thesis provides strong foundation for the advanced implementation on mobile platform in future

Design and Implementation of S-MARKS: A Secure Middleware for Pervasive Computing Applications

As portable devices have become a part of our everyday life, more people are unknowingly participating in a pervasive computing environment. People engage with not a single device for a specific purpose but many devices interacting with each other in the course of ordinary activity. With such prevalence of pervasive technology, the interaction between portable devices needs to be continuous and imperceptible to device users. Pervasive computing requires a small, scalable and robust network which relies heavily on the middleware to resolve communication and security issues. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of S-MARKS which incorporates device validation, resource discovery and a privacy module

Secure Distribution of Protected Content in Information-Centric Networking

The benefits of the ubiquitous caching in ICN are profound, such features make ICN promising for content distribution, but it also introduces a challenge to content protection against the unauthorized access. The protection of a content against unauthorized access requires consumer authentication and involves the conventional end-to-end encryption. However, in information-centric networking (ICN), such end-to-end encryption makes the content caching ineffective since encrypted contents stored in a cache are useless for any consumers except those who know the encryption key. For effective caching of encrypted contents in ICN, we propose a secure distribution of protected content (SDPC) scheme, which ensures that only authenticated consumers can access the content. SDPC is lightweight and allows consumers to verify the originality of the published content by using a symmetric key encryption. Moreover, SDPC naming scheme provides protection against privacy leakage. The security of SDPC was proved with the BAN logic and Scyther tool verification, and simulation results show that SDPC can reduce the content download delay.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, This article is an enhancement version of journal article published in IEEE Systems Journal, DOI: 10.1109/JSYST.2019.2931813. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1808.0328