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

Sviluppo e validazione di un protocollo di scambio delle label con supporto al fast reroute in reti wireless-mesh basate su MPLS

In questa tesi verra` descritta la realizzazione di un protocollo di gestione delle label conforme al RFC 5036 (Label Distribution Pro- tocol, LDP) operante su un prototipo di rete wireless-mesh con tecnologia 802.11 e basata su un meccanismo di label switching conforme al RFC 3031 (Multiprotocol Label Switching, MPLS), viluppato come estensione del software Click Modular Router. In seguito verra` implementata una tecnica di protezione dal malfunzionamento di un nodo o link del Label Swith Path, basata sull’utilizzo del Fast Reroute di MPLS su Detour preventivamente istallati. Il testbed e` costituito da cinque router equipaggiati con due interfacce wireless 802.11a/b/g, due interfacce Ethernet, e da alcuni PC operanti da client che effettuano richieste di istallazione/cancellazione di LSP e generano del traffico su essi. I dispositivi sono configurati in modo da realizzare una rete wireless-mesh multihop, in cui i pacchetti sono istradati secondo le rotte stabilite dall’argoritmo di routing Srcr, sviluppato in Click Modular Router, o secondo il motore di for- warding MPLS, lungo LSP preistallati. Sono stati quindi effettuati una serie di test per validare le soluzioni proposte

A New Neighborhood Monitoring Protocol for Co-ordination of Multi-AGVs

Multi-vehicle systems composed of Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are largely used for industrial transportation in manufacturing and logistics systems. Deployment of a team of AGVs raises management and coordination problems such as deadlock and collision avoidance, conflict resolution, and shared resources negotiation. Decentralized approaches are more suitable than centralized ones for dealing with coordination problems due to the gains in terms of scalability. In a decentralized approach reliable dissemination of AGV state is a crucial operation that is however often neglected. The present paper proposes an efficient reliable protocol for multi-vehicle systems state information exchange among neighbours. This "Neighbourhood Monitoring" protocol allows for developing a reliable decentralized coordination scheme which is suitable for systems with large number of vehicles. The performance of the protocol is evaluated from several standpoints

HUMsim: A Privacy-Oriented Human Mobility Simulator.

Location-based services rise high privacy concerns because they make it possible to collect and infer sensitive information from a person's positions and mobility traces. Many solutions have been proposed to safeguard the users' privacy, at least to a certain extent. However, they generally lacking convincing experimental validation with real human mobility traces. Large databases of real mobility traces are extremely expensive to build or buy. In this paper, we present HUMsim (Human Urban Mobility Simulator), a generator of synthetic but realistic human traces oriented to the experimental validation of privacy solutions. HUMsim generates trajectories that reflect possibly privacy-sensitive habits of people and that, at the same time, account for constraints deriving from a real map. We also validate the soundness of the produced traces by statistically comparing them to real human traces

SecDEv: Secure Distance Evaluation in Wireless Networks

The problem of measuring the distance between two electronic devices in the presence of an adversary is still open. Existing approaches based on distance-bounding protocols are subject to enlargement attacks that cause the target to be perceived farther than it actually is. Enlargement attacks represent a new challenge for the research field of secure localization. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we propose SecDEv, a secure distance-bounding protocol for wireless channels that withstands enlargement attacks based on jam-and-replay. By leveraging on the characteristics of radio frequency signals, SecDEv establishes a security horizon within which a distance is correctly measured and a jam-and-replay attack is detected. Second, we show how SecDEv improves the scalability of secure positioning techniques

The disaster of Costa Concordia cruise ship: An accurate reconstruction based on Black Box and automation system data

In this paper, an accurate reconstruction of the events preceding the January 13th, 2012 impact of the Costa Concordia cruise ship with the rocks of Isola del Giglio is presented, along with the emergency countermeasures activated by the ship automation system after the impact. The reconstruction is entirely based on data recorded by the information systems of the ship and demonstrates the importance of this kind of data from a scientific and forensics point of view. First the authors, three of whom have served as consultants in the trial in Grosseto, Italy, show how information stored in the Voyage Data Recorder, the so called “Black Box”, has been used to calculate the exact time and coordinates of the impact point. An accurate evaluation of these data represents a “conditio sinequa non” to ascertain the effects of the helmsman’s error, who allegedly misunderstood the Master’s orders just 20 seconds before the impact. Then, these effects were studied by means of a purposely developed short term manoeuvring simulator, whose results are also briefly summarized in the paper. Moreover, information stored in the hard disk of the automation system of the ship, concerning the activation of emergency source of energy, have been examined and some results are briefly reported in the paper. The most important data are those concerning the watertight doors, the passenger elevators and the Emergency Diesel Generator. According to the results of our investigations, i) the helmsman’s error appears to have been determinant in the accident; ii) the emergency procedure, which started automatically after blackout of the main power source, does not appear to have performed correctly. In our opinion, both these facts could have influenced the outcome of the last phase of the ship evacuation, during which most of the victims lost their lives