Secure Ad Hoc Networking

The ad hoc networking technology can enable novel civilian and military applications. However, ad hoc networking protocols are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. The design of defense mechanisms is a challenging problem, especially in comparison to securing traditional, fixed-infrastructure networks. In this paper, we discuss challenges and guidelines to secure ad hoc networking protocols, and describe a protocol suite for secure and fault-tolerant communication

Secure Message Transmission in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The vision of nomadic computing with its ubiquitous access has stimulated much interest in the Mobile Ad Hoc Networking (MANET) technology. However, its proliferation strongly depends on the availability of security provisions, among other factors. In the open, collaborative MANET environment practically any node can maliciously or selfishly disrupt and deny communication of other nodes. In this paper, we present and evaluate the Secure Message Transmission (SMT) protocol, which safeguards the data transmission against arbitrary malicious behavior of other nodes. SMT is a lightweight, yet very effective, protocol that can operate solely in an end-to- end manner. It exploits the redundancy of multi-path routing and adapts its operation to remain efficient and effective even in highly adverse environments. SMT is capable of delivering up to 250% more data messages than a protocol that does not secure the data transmission. Moreover, SMT outperforms an alternative single-path protocol, a secure data forwarding protocol we term Secure Single Path (SSP) protocol. SMT imposes up to 68% less routing overhead than SSP, delivers up to 22% more data packets and achieves end-to-end delays that are up to 94% lower than those of SSP. Thus, SMT is better suited to support QoS for real-time communications in the ad hoc networking environment. The security of data transmission is achieved without restrictive assumptions on the network nodes’ trust and network membership, without the use of intrusion detection schemes, and at the expense of moderate multi-path transmission overhead only

Secure Data Communication in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

We address the problem of secure and fault-tolerant communication in the presence of adversaries across a multihop wireless network with frequently changing topology. To effectively cope with arbitrary malicious disruption of data transmissions, we propose and evaluate the secure message transmission (SMT) protocol and its alternative, the secure single-path (SSP) protocol. Among the salient features of SMT and SSP is their ability to operate solely in an end-to-end manner and without restrictive assumptions on the network trust and security associations. As a result, the protocols are applicable to a wide range of network architectures.We demonstrate that highly reliable communication can be sustained with small delay and small delay variability, even when a substantial portion of the network nodes systematically or intermittently disrupt communication. SMT and SSP robustly detect transmission failures and continuously configure their operation to avoid and tolerate data loss, and to ensure the availability of communication. This is achieved at the expense of moderate transmission and routing overhead, which can be traded off for delay. Overall, the ability of the protocols to mitigate both malicious and benign faults allows fast and reliable data transport even in highly adverse network environments

Secure On-Demand Distance Vector Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

We address the problem of securing the route discovery in mobile ad hoc networks, proposing a light-weight yet robust routing protocol, the Distance- Vector Secure Routing Protocol (DV-SRP). DV-SRP discovers on-demand multiple routes, which are established across the network, without providing explicitly the network connectivity. DV-SRP combines the advantages of the type of route discovery first introduced by AODV, with security and thus resilience to adversaries that disrupt the route discovery. Compared to previous proposals in the literature to secure the AODV-like route discovery, DV-SRP is either more robust, or more efficient, or more general

Secure Route Discovery for QoS-Aware Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

We address the problem of securing the route discovery for Quality-of- Service (QoS)-aware routing in ad hoc networks. We provide a specification of secure route discovery for QoS-aware routing. We propose a reactive secure routing protocol, SRP-QoS, to defend against adversaries manipulating link and route metrics and, thus, prevent them from influencing the route selection. SRP-QoS ensures the accuracy of the discovered route(s) with respect to generalized link and route metrics. SRP-QoS is generally applicable, as it does not make restrictive assumptions on the network membership and trust, and it provides metrics for the constituent links of the discovered route(s), allowing the implementation of any route selection algorithm. As a result, SRP-QoS can enable QoS-aware routing in a wide range of ad hoc network instances

A Cross-Layer Design Approach to Enhance 802.15.4

The low-power communication in wireless sensor networks can be impacted by severe channel impairments. In this paper, to address this problem and achieve high network goodput, we propose that the medium access control protocol takes into consideration the error performance of the underlying wireless links. We combine a distributed back-off strategy regulated by the wireless link quality with Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance. We integrate our cross-layer operational approach in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, taking advantage of existing functionality and signaling to avoid network overhead and achieve simplicity in implementation. Our performance evaluation indicates that our scheme is more effective, achieving up to 69% higher goodput, and more efficient, delivering up to 154% more data bits per unit of energy consumed in the network, at the expense of an up to 18% degradation in fairness, compared to the basic 802.15.4

Enhancing Wireless Spectrum Utilization with a Cellular-Ad Hoc Overlay Architecture

The spectrum of deployed wireless cellular communication systems is found to be under-utilized, even though licensed spectrum is at a premium. In this paper, we design a system with an ad hoc overlay network, which we denote as the secondary system (SEC), to efficiently utilize the bandwidth left unused in a cellular system, which we denote as the primary system (PRI). The basic design principle is that the SEC operates in a non-intrusive manner and does not interact with the PRI. We develop the AS-MAC, an Ad hoc SEC Medium Access Control protocol to enable the interoperation of the PRI-SEC system. We address a number of technical challenges pertinent to this networking environment, and investigate a number of AS-MAC variants. Our performance evaluation results indicate that AS-MAC can transparently utilize up to 80% bandwidth left unused by the PRI

A Bandwidth Sharing Approach to Improve Licensed Spectrum Utilization

The spectrum of deployed wireless cellular communication systems is found to be under-utilized, even though licensed spectrum is at a premium. To efficiently utilize the bandwidth left unused in a cellular system, which we denote as the primary system (PRI), we design a system with an ad hoc overlay network, which we denote as the secondary system (SEC). The basic design principle is that the SEC operates in a nonintrusive manner and does not interact with the PRI. We develop the AS-MAC, an Ad hoc SEC Medium Access Control protocol to enable the interoperation of the PRI-SEC system. We address a number of technical challenges pertinent to this networking environment, and evaluate AS-MAC. Our performance evaluation results show that, in a single-hop ASN, the AS-MAC transparently utilizes 75% of the bandwidth left unused by the PRI, while, in multi-hop ASNs, due to spatial reuse, the AS-MAC can utilize up to 180% of the idle PRI resources

Wireless Sensor Networking for Rain-fed Farming Decision Support

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be a valuable decision- support tool for farmers. This motivated our deployment of a WSN system to support rain-fed agriculture in India. We defined promising use cases and resolved technical challenges throughout a two-year deployment of our COMMON- Sense Net system, which provided farmers with environment data. However, the direct use of this technology in the field did not foster the expected participation of the population. This made it difficult to develop the intended decision-support system. Based on this experience, we take the following position in this paper: currently, the deployment of WSN technology in developing regions is more likely to be effective if it targets scientists and technical personnel as users, rather than the farmers themselves. We base this claim on the lessons learned from the COMMON-Sense system deployment and the results of an extensive user experiment with agriculture scientists, which we describe in this paper

Secure and Privacy-Enhancing Vehicular Communication Demonstration of Implementation and Operation

Abstract—With a number of projects developing vehicular communication systems, there is rising awareness on threats and the need to introduce security and privacy-enhancing mechanisms. With recent results, in principle in agreement across different major projects, there has been little work on implementation and demonstration of security and privacyenhancing mechanisms. The contribution of this work is exactly in this direction: we present a demonstration of our system, comprising a range of mechanisms, developed to secure vehicular communications (VC) and enhance the location privacy of the users of VC systems