Spectrum sharing security and attacks in CRNs: a review

Cognitive Radio plays a major part in communication technology by resolving the shortage of the spectrum through usage of dynamic spectrum access and artificial intelligence characteristics. The element of spectrum sharing in cognitive radio is a fundament al approach in utilising free channels. Cooperatively communicating cognitive radio devices use the common control channel of the cognitive radio medium access control to achieve spectrum sharing. Thus, the common control channel and consequently spectrum sharing security are vital to ensuring security in the subsequent data communication among cognitive radio nodes. In addition to well known security problems in wireless networks, cognitive radio networks introduce new classes of security threats and challenges, such as licensed user emulation attacks in spectrum sensing and misbehaviours in the common control channel transactions, which degrade the overall network operation and performance. This review paper briefly presents the known threats and attacks in wireless networks before it looks into the concept of cognitive radio and its main functionality. The paper then mainly focuses on spectrum sharing security and its related challenges. Since spectrum sharing is enabled through usage of the common control channel, more attention is paid to the security of the common control channel by looking into its security threats as well as protection and detection mechanisms. Finally, the pros and cons as well as the comparisons of different CR - specific security mechanisms are presented with some open research issues and challenges

The Future of Cybercrime: AI and Emerging Technologies Are Creating a Cybercrime Tsunami

This paper reviews the impact of AI and emerging technologies on the future of cybercrime and the necessary strategies to combat it effectively. Society faces a pressing challenge as cybercrime proliferates through AI and emerging technologies. At the same time, law enforcement and regulators struggle to keep it up. Our primary challenge is raising awareness as cybercrime operates within a distinct criminal ecosystem. We explore the hijacking of emerging technologies by criminals (CrimeTech) and their use in illicit activities, along with the tools and processes (InfoSec) to protect against future cybercrime. We also explore the role of AI and emerging technologies (DeepTech) in supporting law enforcement, regulation, and legal services (LawTech)

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

A Survey of Access Control Models in Wireless Sensor Networks

Copyright 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted considerable interest in the research community, because of their wide range of applications. However, due to the distributed nature of WSNs and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. Resource constraints in sensor nodes mean that security mechanisms with a large overhead of computation and communication are impractical to use in WSNs; security in sensor networks is, therefore, a challenge. Access control is a critical security service that offers the appropriate access privileges to legitimate users and prevents illegitimate users from unauthorized access. However, access control has not received much attention in the context of WSNs. This paper provides an overview of security threats and attacks, outlines the security requirements and presents a state-of-the-art survey on access control models, including a comparison and evaluation based on their characteristics in WSNs. Potential challenging issues for access control schemes in WSNs are also discussed.Peer reviewe

Blindspot: Indistinguishable Anonymous Communications

Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring low-volume unobservable communication.Comment: 13 Page

A review of solutions for SDN-Exclusive security issues

Software Defined Networking is a paradigm still in its emergent stages in the realm of production-scale networks. Centralisation of network control introduces a new level of flexibility for network administrators and programmers. Security is a huge factor contributing to consumer resistance to implementation of SDN architecture. Without addressing the issues inherent from SDNs centralised nature, the benefits in performance and network configurative flexibility cannot be harnessed. This paper explores key threats posed to SDN environments and comparatively analyses some of the mechanisms proposed as mitigations against these threats – it also provides some insight into the future works which would enable a securer SDN architecture.

Security Challenges from Abuse of Cloud Service Threat

Cloud computing is an ever-growing technology that leverages dynamic and versatile provision of computational resources and services. In spite of countless benefits that cloud service has to offer, there is always a security concern for new threats and risks. The paper provides a useful introduction to the rising security issues of Abuse of cloud service threat, which has no standard security measures to mitigate its risks and vulnerabilities. The threat can result an unbearable system gridlock and can make cloud services unavailable or even complete shutdown. The study has identified the potential challenges, as BotNet, BotCloud, Shared Technology Vulnerability and Malicious Insiders, from Abuse of cloud service threat. It has further described the attacking methods, impacts and the reasons due to the identified challenges. The study has evaluated the current available solutions and proposed mitigating security controls for the security risks and challenges from Abuse of cloud services threat