Security of the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Countermeasures

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. Hence, the security of IoT should start with foremost securing WSNs ahead of the other components. However, owing to the absence of a physical line-of-defense, i.e., there is no dedicated infrastructure such as gateways to watch and observe the flowing information in the network, security of WSNs along with IoT is of a big concern to the scientific community. More specifically, for the application areas in which CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) has prime importance, WSNs and emerging IoT technology might constitute an open avenue for the attackers. Besides, recent integration and collaboration of WSNs with IoT will open new challenges and problems in terms of security. Hence, this would be a nightmare for the individuals using these systems as well as the security administrators who are managing those networks. Therefore, a detailed review of security attacks towards WSNs and IoT, along with the techniques for prevention, detection, and mitigation of those attacks are provided in this paper. In this text, attacks are categorized and treated into mainly two parts, most or all types of attacks towards WSNs and IoT are investigated under that umbrella: “Passive Attacks” and “Active Attacks”. Understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help paving a secure path towards the proliferation and public acceptance of IoT technology

Utilising in-vehicle information to detect traffic conditions in vehicular ad-hoc networks

In the last decade, cooperative vehicular network has been one of the most studied areas for developing the intelligent transportation systems (ITS). It is considered as an important approach to share the periodic traffic situations over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to improve efficiency and safety over the road. In addition to the uses of ITS, VANETs will contribute in service access, cooperative driving, entertainment and navigation for cars of the future. Vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communication are two distinct avenues that make possible efficient delivery of messages through direct wireless transmissions in traffic regions. Furthermore, promising quality of communication performance is desirable for a communication system composed mostly if roaming participants; such a system needs to be dynamic, flexible and infrastructure-less. Thus VANET architecture is a natural fit for ITS. However, there are a number of issues in exchanging traffic data over high mobility of VANET, such as broadcast storms, hidden nodes and network instability. Therefore, vehicular traffic efficiency applications have been investigated recently using VANET. This aspect of research is primarily concerned with increasing the traffic awareness over roads. In this thesis, a novel model, Efficient Traffic Conditions Detection (ETraCD) is proposed to detect the traffic conditions utilising vehicles’ characteristics and in-vehicles sensors information to evaluate traffic situations that are gathered from the nodes (vehicles) in VANET. The model revolves around the core idea to what extent we will be considering the traffic characteristics between groups of cars rather than individual cars. This does not concern the physical transmission of data but the data processing in the network. More precisely, vehicles are clustered into traffic groups based on the similarity of sensors’s data. ETraCD (a) divides the situations of vehicles into clusters, (b) designs a set of metrics to get the correlations among vehicles and (c) detects the traffic condition in certain areas. These approaches have been simulated in NS3 network simulator to investigate the performance of stability of the network, latency, and the accuracy of traffic situations detection. The proposed model applies V2V clustering paradigm for detecting traffic conditions, it has been implemented and its features investigated through simulation runs. It shows the benefit of using the vehicular sensors informations such as ABS, windscreen lights and so on based on V2V communication to provide an efficient traffic conclusion in urban environment. Experiments also show improved overall performance when compared to previous protocols

Performance Analysis of UAV Enabled Disaster Recovery Networks: A Stochastic Geometric Framework Based on Cluster Processes

In this paper, we develop a comprehensive statistical framework to characterize and model large-scale unmanned aerial vehicle-enabled post-disaster recovery cellular networks. In the case of natural or man-made disasters, the cellular network is vulnerable to destruction resulting in coverage voids or coverage holes. Drone-based small cellular networks (DSCNs) can be rapidly deployed to fill such coverage voids. Due to capacity and back-hauling limitations on drone small cells (DSCs), each coverage hole requires a multitude of DSCs to meet the shortfall coverage at a desired quality-of-service. Moreover, ground users also tend to cluster in hot-spots in a post-disaster scenario. Motivated by this fact, we consider the clustered deployment of DSCs around the site of a destroyed BS. Joint consideration partially operating BSs and deployed DSCs yields a unique topology for such public safety networks. Borrowing tools from stochastic geometry, we develop a statistical framework to quantify the down-link performance of a DSCN. Our proposed clustering mechanism extends the traditional Matern and Thomas cluster processes to a more general case, where cluster size is dependent upon the size of the coverage hole. We then employ the newly developed framework to find closed-form expressions (later verified by Monte-Carlo simulations) to quantify the coverage probability, area spectral efficiency, and the energy efficiency for the down-link mobile user. Finally, we explore several design parameters (for both of the adopted cluster processes) that address optimal deployment of the network (i.e., number of drones per cluster, drone altitudes, and transmit power ratio between the traditional surviving base stations and the drone base stations)

Survey and taxonomy of clustering algorithms in 5G

The large-scale deployment of fifth generation (5G) is expected to produce a massive amount of data with high variability due to ultra-densification and the rapid increase in a heterogeneous range of applications and services (e.g., virtual reality, augmented reality, and driver-less vehicles), and network devices (e.g., smart gadgets and sensors). Clustering organizes network topology by segregating nodes with similar interests or behaviors in a network into logical groups in order to achieve network-level and cluster-level enhancements, particularly cluster stability, load balancing, social awareness, fairness, and quality of service. Clustering has been investigated to support mobile user equipment (UE) in access networks, whereby UEs form clusters themselves and may connect to BSs. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the research work of clustering schemes proposed for various scenarios in 5G networks and highlight various aspects of clustering schemes, including objectives, challenges, metrics, characteristics, performance measures. Furthermore, we present open issues of clustering in 5G

A QoS-Based Wireless Multimedia Sensor Cluster Protocol

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide a wireless network infrastructure for sensed data transport in environments where wired or satellite technologies cannot be used. Because the embedded hardware of the sensor nodes has been improved very much in the last years and the number of real deployments is increasing considerably, they have become a reliable option for the transmission of any type of sensed data, from few sensed measures to multimedia data. This paper proposes a new protocol that uses an ad hoc cluster based architecture which is able to adapt the logical sensor network topology to the delivered multimedia stream features, guaranteeing the quality of the communications. The proposed protocol uses the quality of service (QoS) parameters, such as bandwidth, delay, jitter, and packet loss, of each type of multimedia stream as a basis for the sensor clusters creation and organization inside the WSN, providing end-to-end QoS for each multimedia stream. We present real experiments that show the performance of the protocol for several video and audio cases when it is runningThis work has been partially supported by the "Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion," through the "Plan Nacional de I+D+i 2008-2011" in the "Subprograma de Proyectos de Investigacion Fundamental," Project TEC2011-27516. This work has also been partially supported by the Instituto de Telecomunicacoes, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group (NetGNA), Portugal, by the Government of Russian Federation, Grant 074-U01, and by National Funding from the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) through the PEst-OE/EEI/LA0008/2013 Project.Díaz Santos, JR.; Lloret, J.; Jimenez, JM.; Rodrigues, JJPC. (2014). A QoS-Based Wireless Multimedia Sensor Cluster Protocol. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks. 2014:1-17. https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/480372S1172014Bri, D., Garcia, M., Lloret, J., & Dini, P. (2009). 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Security in Mobile Networks: Communication and Localization

Nowadays the mobile networks are everywhere. The world is becoming more dependent on wireless and mobile services, but the rapid growth of these technologies usually underestimates security aspects. As wireless and mobile services grow, weaknesses in network infrastructures become clearer. One of the problems is privacy. Wireless technologies can reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and make important information more readily and widely available. But, there are also risks. Without appropriate safeguards, these data can be read and modified by unauthorized users. There are many solutions, less and more effective, to protect the data from unauthorized users. But, a specific application could distinguish more data flows between authorized users. Protect the privacy of these information between subsets of users is not a trivial problem. Another problem is the reliability of the wireless service. Multi-vehicle systems composed of Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are largely used for industrial transportation in manufacturing and logistics systems. These vehicles use a mobile wireless network to exchange information in order to coordinate their tasks and movements. The reliable dissemination of these information is a crucial operation, because the AGVs may achieve an inconsistent view of the system leading to the failure of the coordination task. This has clear safety implications. Going more in deep, even if the communication are confidential and reliable, anyway the positioning information could be corrupted. Usually, vehicles get the positioning information through a secondary wireless network system such as GPS. Nevertheless, the widespread civil GPS is extremely fragile in adversarial scenarios. An insecure distance or position estimation could produce security problems such as unauthorized accesses, denial of service, thefts, integrity disruption with possible safety implications and intentional disasters. In this dissertation, we face these three problems, proposing an original solution for each one

Adaptive Network Densification with Small Cell Mobile Base Stations Carried by Vehicles

1noL'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmentopen676. INGEGNERIA ELETTRICAnopartially_openembargoed_20211014Mohammadnia, Foroog

Object tracking sensor networks in smart cities: Taxonomy, architecture, applications, research challenges and future directions

The development of pervasive communication devices and the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) have acted as an essential part in the feasibility of smart city initiatives. Wireless sensor network (WSN) as a key enabling technology in IoT offers the potential for cities to get smatter. WSNs gained tremendous attention during the recent years because of their rising number of applications that enables remote monitoring and tracking in smart cities. One of the most exciting applications of WSNs in smart cities is detection, monitoring, and tracking which is referred to as object tracking sensor networks (OTSN). The adaptation of OTSN into urban cities brought new exciting challenges for reaching the goal of future smart cities. Such challenges focus primarily on problems related to active monitoring and tracking in smart cities. In this paper, we present the essential characteristics of OTSN, monitoring and tracking application used with the content of smart city. Moreover, we discussed the taxonomy of OTSN along with analysis and comparison. Furthermore, research challenges are investigated concerning energy reservation, object detection, object speed, accuracy in tracking, sensor node collaboration, data aggregation and object recovery position estimation. This review can serve as a benchmark for researchers for future development of smart cities in the context of OTSN. Lastly, we provide future research direction

ActMesh- A Cognitive Resource Management paradigm for dynamic mobile Internet Access with Reliability Guarantees

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are going increasing attention as a flexible low-cost networking architecture to provide media Internet access over metropolitan areas to mobile clients requiring multimedia services. In WMNs, Mesh Routers (MRs) from the mesh backbone and accomplish the twofold task of traffic forwarding, as well as providing multimedia access to mobile Mesh Clients (MCs). Due to the intensive bandwidth-resource requested for supporting QoS-demanding multimedia services, performance of the current WMNs is mainly limited by spectrum-crowding and traffic-congestion, as only scarce spectrum-resources is currently licensed for the MCs' access. In principle, this problem could be mitigated by exploiting in a media-friendly (e.g., content-aware) way the context-aware capabilities offered by the Cognitive Radio (CR) paradigm. As integrated exploitation of both content and context-aware system's capabilities is at the basis of our proposed Active Mesh (ActMesh) networking paradigm. This last aims at defining a network-wide architecture for realizing media-friendly Cognitive Mesh nets (e.g., context aware Cognitive Mesh nets). Hence, main contribution of this work is four fold: 1. After introducing main functional blocks of our ActMesh architecture, suitable self-adaptive Belief Propagation and Soft Data Fusion algorithms are designed to provide context-awareness. This is done under both cooperative and noncooperative sensing frameworks. 2. The resulting network-wide resource management problem is modelled as a constrained stochastic Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problem, with the dual (contrasting) objective to maximize spectrum efficiency at the network level, while accounting for the perceived quality of the delivered media flows at the client level. 3. A fully distributed, scalable and self-adaptive implementation of the resulting Active Resource Manager (ARM) is deployed, that explicitly accounts for the energy limits of the battery powered MCs and the effects induced by both fading and client mobility. Due to informationally decentralized architecture of the ActMesh net, the complexity of (possibly, optimal) centralized solutions for resource management becomes prohibitive when number of MCs accessing ActMesh net grow. Furthermore, centralized resource management solutions could required large amounts of time to collect and process the required network information, which, in turn, induce delay that can be unacceptable for delay sensitive media applications, e.g., multimedia streaming. Hence, it is important to develop network-wide ARM policies that are both distributed and scalable by exploiting the radio MCs capabilities to sense, adapt and coordinate themselves. We validate our analytical models via simulation based numerical tests, that support actual effectiveness of the overall ActMesh paradigm, both in terms of objective and subjective performance metrics. In particular, the basic tradeoff among backbone traffic-vs-access traffic arising in the ActMesh net from the bandwidth-efficient opportunistic resource allocation policy pursued by the deployed ARM is numerically characterized. The standardization framework we inspire to is the emerging IEEE 802.16h one