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

Security in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs)

Major research domains in the WLAN security include: access control & data frame protection, lightweight authentication and secure handoff. Access control standard like IEEE 802.11i provides flexibility in user authentication but on the other hand fell prey to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. For Protecting the data communication between two communicating devices—three standard protocols i.e., WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) and AES-CCMP (Advanced Encryption Standard—Counter mode with CBC-MAC protocol) are used. Out of these, AES-CCMP protocol is secure enough and mostly used in enterprises. In WLAN environment lightweight authentication is an asset, provided it also satisfies other security properties like protecting the authentication stream or token along with securing the transmitted message. CAPWAP (Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points), HOKEY (Hand Over Keying) and IEEE 802.11r are major protocols for executing the secure handoff. In WLANs, handoff should not only be performed within time limits as required by the real time applications but should also be used to transfer safely the keying material for further communication. In this chapter, a comparative study of the security mechanisms under the above-mentioned research domains is provided

Secure Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to the service providers. Unlike traditional Wi-Fi networks, with each access point (AP) connected to the wired network, in WMNs only a subset of the APs are required to be connected to the wired network. The APs that are connected to the wired network are called the Internet gateways (IGWs), while the APs that do not have wired connections are called the mesh routers (MRs). The MRs are connected to the IGWs using multi-hop communication. The IGWs provide access to conventional clients and interconnect ad hoc, sensor, cellular, and other networks to the Internet. However, most of the existing routing protocols for WMNs are extensions of protocols originally designed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and thus they perform sub-optimally. Moreover, most routing protocols for WMNs are designed without security issues in mind, where the nodes are all assumed to be honest. In practical deployment scenarios, this assumption does not hold. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of security issues in WMNs and then particularly focuses on secure routing in these networks. First, it identifies security vulnerabilities in the medium access control (MAC) and the network layers. Various possibilities of compromising data confidentiality, data integrity, replay attacks and offline cryptanalysis are also discussed. Then various types of attacks in the MAC and the network layers are discussed. After enumerating the various types of attacks on the MAC and the network layer, the chapter briefly discusses on some of the preventive mechanisms for these attacks.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures, 5 table

Factors Impacting Key Management Effectiveness in Secured Wireless Networks

The use of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) offers a cryptographic solution that can overcome many, but not all, of the MANET security problems. One of the most critical aspects of a PKI system is how well it implements Key Management. Key Management deals with key generation, key storage, key distribution, key updating, key revocation, and certificate service in accordance with security policies over the lifecycle of the cryptography. The approach supported by traditional PKI works well in fixed wired networks, but it may not appropriate for MANET due to the lack of fixed infrastructure to support the PKI. This research seeks to identify best practices in securing networks which may be applied to new network architectures

개선된 인증과 키 분배 기법

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 수리과학부, 2014. 2. 김명환.Nowadays, anonymity property of user authentication scheme becomes important. From 2003, Park et al., Juang et al., and other researchers proposed a useful, secure and efficient authenticated-key exchange scheme. However, There schemes did not provide the useful methods against the various efficient attacks. They argued that they provided the identity privacy- mutual authentication-half-forward secrecy. But their suggestions have limited solutions. So we have researched the about 30 papers and suggested an improved authentication and key exchange scheme. Then, we show that the proposed scheme is secure against the various attacks methods (linear attack, inverse, dictionary, MTMD attacks etc).Chapter 1 Introduction ........................................................ 6 1.1 Motivation ...............................................................................6 1.2 Organization ............................................................................8 Chapter 2 Secure Authenticated Key Exchange .................. 11 2.1 AKE Security ........................................................................11 2.2 Protocol Attack Types ...........................................................17 Chapter 3Secure Authenticated Key Exchange ................... 19 3.1 The Authentication Key Protocol..........................................19 3.2 General Security-Analysis Discussion..................................26 Chapter 4Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol................ 40 4.1 The Improved AKE ...............................................................41 4.2 An Improved Anonymous AKE Scheme ..............................62 Chapter 5Conclusion ...................................................... 75 Bibliography .................................................................... 77 Abstract ........................................................................... 87Docto

Improving Network Performance, Security and Robustness in Hybrid Wireless Networks Using a Satellite Overlay

In this thesis we propose that the addition of a satellite overlay to large or dense wireless networks will result in improvement in application performance and network reliability, and also enable efficient security solutions that are well-suited for wireless nodes with limited resources. We term the combined network as a hybrid wireless network. Through analysis, network modeling and simulation, we quantify the improvement in end-to-end performance in such networks, compared to flat wireless networks. We also propose a new analytical method for modeling and estimating the performance of hybrid wireless networks. We create a loss network model for hybrid networks using the hierarchical reduced loss network model, adapted for packet-switched networks. Applying a fixed point approximation method on the set of relations modeling the hierarchical loss network, we derive a solution that converges to a fixed point for the parameter set. We analyze the sensitivity of the performance metric to variations in the network parameters by applying Automatic Differentiation to the performance model. We thus develop a method for parameter optimization and sensitivity analysis of protocols for designing hybrid networks. We investigate how the satellite overlay can help to implement better solutions for secure group communications in hybrid wireless networks. We propose a source authentication protocol for multicast communications that makes intelligent use of the satellite overlay, by modifying and extending TESLA certificates. We also propose a probabilistic non-repudiation technique that uses the satellite as a proxy node. We describe how the authentication protocol can be integrated with a topology-aware hierarchical multicast routing protocol to design a secure multicast routing protocol that is robust to active attacks. Lastly, we examine how the end-to-end delay is adversely affected when IP Security protocol (IPSEC) and Secure Socket Layer protocol (SSL) are applied to unicast communications in hybrid networks. For network-layer security with low delay, we propose the use of the Layered IPSEC protocol, with a modified Internet Key Exchange protocol. For secure web browsing with low delay, we propose the Dual-mode SSL protocol. We present simulation results to quantify the performance improvement with our proposed protocols, compared to the traditional solutions

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocols for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation wireless networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to service providers. As WMNs become an increasingly popular replacement technology for last-mile connectivity to the home networking, community and neighborhood networking, it is imperative to design efficient and secure communication protocols for these networks. However, several vulnerabilities exist in currently existing protocols for WMNs. These security loopholes can be exploited by potential attackers to launch attack on WMNs. The absence of a central point of administration makes securing WMNs even more challenging. The broadcast nature of transmission and the dependency on the intermediate nodes for multi-hop communications lead to several security vulnerabilities in WMNs. The attacks can be external as well as internal in nature. External attacks are launched by intruders who are not authorized users of the network. For example, an intruding node may eavesdrop on the packets and replay those packets at a later point of time to gain access to the network resources. On the other hand, the internal attacks are launched by the nodes that are part of the WMN. On example of such attack is an intermediate node dropping packets which it was supposed to forward. This chapter presents a comprehensive discussion on the current authentication and privacy protection schemes for WMN. In addition, it proposes a novel security protocol for node authentication and message confidentiality and an anonymization scheme for privacy protection of users in WMNs.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures. The work is an extended version of the author's previous works submitted in CoRR: arXiv:1107.5538v1 and arXiv:1102.1226v