A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Security in Wireless Sensor Networks: Issues and Challenges

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging technology that shows great promise for various futuristic applications both for mass public and military. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it lucrative for being exploited in abundance in future. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also incurs various types of security threats. The intent of this paper is to investigate the security related issues and challenges in wireless sensor networks. We identify the security threats, review proposed security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks. We also discuss the holistic view of security for ensuring layered and robust security in wireless sensor networks.Comment: 6 page

KALwEN+: Practical Key Management Schemes for Gossip-Based Wireless Medical Sensor Networks

The constrained resources of sensors restrict the design of a key management scheme for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this work, we first formalize the security model of ALwEN, which is a gossip-based wireless medical sensor network (WMSN) for ambient assisted living. Our security model considers the node capture, the gossip-based network and the revocation problems, which should be valuable for ALwEN-like applications. Based on Shamir's secret sharing technique, we then propose two key management schemes for ALwEN, namely the KALwEN+ schemes, which are proven with the security properties defined in the security model. The KALwEN+ schemes not only fit ALwEN, but also can be tailored to other scalable wireless sensor networks based on gossiping

Wireless and Physical Security via Embedded Sensor Networks

Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems (WIDS) monitor 802.11 wireless frames (Layer-2) in an attempt to detect misuse. What distinguishes a WIDS from a traditional Network IDS is the ability to utilize the broadcast nature of the medium to reconstruct the physical location of the offending party, as opposed to its possibly spoofed (MAC addresses) identity in cyber space. Traditional Wireless Network Security Systems are still heavily anchored in the digital plane of "cyber space" and hence cannot be used reliably or effectively to derive the physical identity of an intruder in order to prevent further malicious wireless broadcasts, for example by escorting an intruder off the premises based on physical evidence. In this paper, we argue that Embedded Sensor Networks could be used effectively to bridge the gap between digital and physical security planes, and thus could be leveraged to provide reciprocal benefit to surveillance and security tasks on both planes. Toward that end, we present our recent experience integrating wireless networking security services into the SNBENCH (Sensor Network workBench). The SNBENCH provides an extensible framework that enables the rapid development and automated deployment of Sensor Network applications on a shared, embedded sensing and actuation infrastructure. The SNBENCH's extensible architecture allows an engineer to quickly integrate new sensing and response capabilities into the SNBENCH framework, while high-level languages and compilers allow novice SN programmers to compose SN service logic, unaware of the lower-level implementation details of tools on which their services rely. In this paper we convey the simplicity of the service composition through concrete examples that illustrate the power and potential of Wireless Security Services that span both the physical and digital plane.National Science Foundation (CISE/CSR 0720604, ENG/EFRI 0735974, CIES/CNS 0520166, CNS/ITR 0205294, CISE/ERA RI 0202067