An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

Conflict Management. The Contribution of the Christian Church

It is true now that man lives in a world of conflict. Conflict is an ever-present process in human relations. Conflict situations indeed appear frequently in daily, public and private life. Conflict may occur within and among families, groups, communities or nations; and they may be fuelled by ethnic, racial, religious, or economic differences, or may arise from differences in ideologies, values and beliefs. Conflict may be on a small or large scale. Conflict charge the people with tensions, threats, fears, anxieties and uncertainties. What makes a society ideal is the extent to which the conflicting interests and needs in a society are constructively managed so that violence does not threaten its continued existence. Since it is obvious that conflicts in any given society is inevitable, management and resolution of conflict is the very essence of talking about conflict. This is what this work is set to achieve and to offer suggestions on how to manage and resolve conflict thereby reducing its negative and destructive effects. This work showed the church has the potential to contribute to the management and resolution of conflicts in Nigeria

Performance Analysis of Denial-of-Sleep Attack-Prone MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. On the other hand, the presence as well as the absence of security features implemented in resource constrained sensors can have negative effects on their energy consumption. Indeed, the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection could give room for energy-drain attacks such as denial-of-sleep attacks which has a higher negative impact on the life span (availability) of the sensors than the presence of security techniques. This paper focuses on denial-of-sleep attacks by simulating three Media Access Control (MAC) protocols – Sensor-MAC, Timeout-MAC and TunableMAC – under different network sizes. We evaluate, compare, and analyse the received signal strength and the link quality indicators for each of these protocols. The results of our simulation provide insight into how these parameters can be used to detect a denial-of-sleep attack. Finally, we propose a novel architecture for tackling denial-of-sleep attacks by propagating relevant knowledge via intelligent agents

Proactive Energy-Efficiency: Evaluation of Duty-Cycled MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty-cycled protocols – Sensor-MAC (SMAC), Timeout-MAC (TMAC) and TunableMAC. Although other duty-cycled protocols are reviewed, the aforementioned three protocols are observed in OMNET++ simulator via the Castalia framework. Graphical results are produced which show the energy consumption and throughput as the duty cycle is varied and the variations in results for each of the three protocols are analyzed. The results provide insight into how to ensure ‘proactive energy-efficiency’ whereby the impact of denial-of-sleep attacks can be minimized while throughput is maximized

Performance and Energy-Tuning Methodology for Wireless Sensor Networks Using TunableMAC

Energy-efficiency and performance are at the forefront with regards to wireless sensor networks due to the resource-constrained nature of the sensors on the network. Most of the energy in a sensor is consumed by the radio and this therefore creates the need for a more efficient use of the Media Access Control (MAC) layer which controls access to the radio. The Castalia framework which runs on the OMNET++ simulation platform provides a MAC layer protocol – TunableMAC – which is used in this paper for tuning of performance and consumed power. Our goal is to improve as much as possible the performance/energy balance in terms of resources used up by security features, while attempting to preserve the overall lifespan of the wireless sensors. This paper investigates performance parameters for TunableMAC such as energy consumed, latency, throughput and network lifetime based on simulated temperature sensors. A 5-step methodology is proposed that can be helpful for minimizing the impact of denial-of-sleep (DOS) attacks. Hence, the benefit of this research is that it feeds into the development of a novel MAC protocol that is energy-aware and can autonomously guard against energy drain attacks such as DOS attacks

Layered-MAC: An Energy-Protected and Efficient Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the radio of the wireless sensor node happens to be the highest source of energy consumption. Hence, there is a need to focus on the MAC layer, as it controls access to the radio. While there are several existing techniques to make sensors more energy-efficient, not many of them consider the security aspects of energy efficiency. By this we mean, protecting energy from external attacks. The existing protocols focus mainly on either duty-cycling (Sensor-MAC, Time-out MAC) or clustering (Gateway MAC), as a way of conserving energy. One of such attacks to energy is the denial-of-sleep (DoSL) attack which is a specific kind of denial-of-service attacks designed to drain the energy of battery-powered sensors in a Wireless Sensor Network. This paper explains the development of a new MAC-layer protocol called Layered-MAC aimed at not just energy efficiency but energy protection against DoSL attacks. The protocol is implemented on the OMNET++ and Castalia simulator. The results from the simulation are then compared with two representative existing duty-cycled protocols (Time-out MAC and Sensor-MAC) and significant improvements are present. One of the benefits of the developed protocol is that, not only does it attempt to save energy, but it protects energy from DoSL attacks. There are two main contributions from this research – the first is the additional layer of network metrics (RSSI and LQI) consideration, based on the premise that protection/security is not possible without some form of measurement of assets, and the cluster head rotation which adds an extra layer of energy protection while considering energy efficiency

Sensor Intelligence for Tackling Energy-Drain Attacks on Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we propose a model for intelligent agents (sensors) on a Wireless Sensor Network to guard against energy-drain attacks in an energy-efficient and autonomous manner. This is intended to be achieved via an energy-harvested Wireless Sensor Network using a novel architecture to propagate knowledge to other sensors based on automated reasoning from an attacked sensor

Analysis of the Implementation of Child Rights Law in Nigeria

The aim of the study was to analyse the implementation of Child Rights Lawin Nigeria so far. To accomplish this: three research questions and threehypotheses were formulated to guide the investigation. Descriptive surveyresearch was employed carrying out the study. Stratified random samplingtechnique was used to select 1811 respondents comprising 546 CivilServants, 291 Industrialists and 344 Traders. Data analysed usingdescriptive statistics and analysis of variance were collected through aquestionnaire entitled-implementation of Child Rights Law questionnaire(ICRLQ). The findings indicated that 68.75% of Child Rights Law had beenimplemented. The implications of these findings were discussed

Food safety behaviour of household food preparers in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria

Food borne illnesses still remain a public health challenge in developing countries. This study examines the Food safety behaviour, here conceptualised simply as a wholistic measure of food safety knowledge and practices, of household food preparers in AkwaIbom State, Nigeria. Cross-sectional data was collected, using a structured questionnaire, based on a multistage sampling procedure resulting in a total of 457 respondents. Specifically, the study estimated the prevalence, margin and intensity of food safety behaviour of household food preparers. As a precursor to measuring prevalence, margin and intensity, twenty nine (29) food safety knowledge items and twenty two (22) food safety practices, a total of 41 items were used as the basis for obtaining a food safety behaviour index, fsbi. This food safety behaviour index is, summarily, a measure of a household food preparers’ food safety knowledge and practices expressed as a proportion of all the food safety knowledge and practice items. The mean fsbi, 0.64, was used to dichotomize household food preparers into well behaved and poorly behaved. The margin and intensity measures are based on the proportion of the household food preparers that are poorly behaved. Additionally, a fractional probitregression was estimated to determine the factors affecting the food safety behaviour of household food preparers in the study area. The results, of the percentage prevalence, show that, given the mean fsbi as critical index, 52% of household food preparers are poorly behaved. A disaggregated mean, another measure of prevalence, reveals that the mean fsbifor poorly behaved and well behaved household food preparers is 0.32 and 0.65 respectively. The mean margins, 0.07 and 0.04, are the figures by which the fsbi of household food preparers that are poorly behaved and all households respectively could be increased to ensure household food preparers are all well behaved. The intensity values, 0.02 and 0.01 indicate that the gap between the poorly behaved and well behaved is wider when the mean proportionate margin is expressed as a function of the total number of households that poorly behaved than the total number of households. Output from the fractional regression reveal that a household food preparer who is educated and confident in safety labels is 0.8% and 6% times more likely to be well behaved than one who is not. It can be concluded based on results that even though the margin between well behaved and poorly behaved is not so intense, much is still left to be desired as regards the overall prevalence of food safety knowledge and practices of households in the study. Keywords: Food Safety, Prevalence, Margin, Intensity, Fractional Probit Regression

Dietary diversity of households in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria

This study analysed the dietary diversity of households in Akwa Ibom State. Cross-sectional data was collected using a multistage sampling procedure resulting in 457 respondents. Specifically, the study determined the prevalence, margin and intensity of dietary diversity of households based on three critical indices. Additionally, a fractional probit regression was estimated to determine the factors affecting the dietary diversity of households. Based on three critical indices (0.67, 0.87 and 0.59), 90%, 62% and 95% of the population respectively have sufficiently diverse diets. The disaggregated mean prevalence (given the three critical indices) indicates that the difference, in number of food groups consumed, between households with less than diverse and sufficiently diverse diets are five (5), four (4) and eight (8) respectively. The mean margin indicates that, at the minimum, policy may seek to increase the number of food groups consumed by households with less than diverse diets by two food groups. The intensity of the margin at critical index 0.59 is 0.17, showing that the margin of dietary diversity is most critical in this context. Results from the fractional probit regression unveil that education, household income, access to home garden, access to other farmland and ownership of livestock are significant in explaining the probability of households being dietary diverse. Keywords: Dietary Diversity; Prevalence; Margin; Intensity; Fractional Probit Regressio