SECURITY ISSUES AND SOLUTIONS ANALYSIS OF ROUTING PROTOCOLS IN

WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK AND WIRELESS MESH NETWORK

Done By :- Aman Singh(13BCE0827)VIT UNIVESITY VELLORE TAMIL NADU)

Faculty : Nalini N

CONTENTS. Introduction• Security Issues in (Wireless Sensor Networks)WMNs• Threats and Attacks in WMNs and WSNs• Solutions for Security Issues in WMNs• Prospects for Future• Proposed Solutions• References

INTRODUCTION

• WSN are composed of a large set of homogeneous nodes with extreme resource constraints. Each sensor node has wireless communication capability plus some level of intelligence for signal processing and data networking. These nodes are usually scattered over the area to be monitored to collect data, process it, and forward it to a central node for further processing. In case of wireless sensor network, the communication among the sensors is done using wireless transceivers. The low cost and adaptability of wireless sensor networks make them a better option to be commercial and scientific use and thus they are widely used in civil, military, and other fields. WSN, as an emerging network technology, have risen gradually recently. They can obtain a lot of detailed and reliable information in the network distributed area anytime and anywhere Wireless sensor networks have a very important scientific and practical value.

SECURITY ISSUES IN WMNS

The security issues for WMNs are basically identical to security requirements for any other communication system. These issues include:

Availability : - Availability ensures the survivability of network services despite denial of service attacks. Access Control:- It ensures that only authorized actions can be performed. Also, access control entails the authentication and authorization of the network entities of the WMNs.

SECURITY ISSUES IN WMNS

Integrity:- Integrity guarantees that a message being transferred is never corrupted. A message could be corrupted because of benign failures, such as radio propagation impairment, or because of malicious attacks on the network.Confidentiality:-It ensures that the information is only accessible to those who have been authorized to access it.Non-repudiation:- Non-repudiation ensures that the sender and the receiver of a message cannot deny that they have ever sent or received such a message.

THREATS AND ATTACKS IN WMNS AND WSNS

• Wireless sensor networks are subject to several types of attacks which can be categorized into attacks based on the layers present in different protocols. We classify all the security threats based on different layers of the OSI.

• The physical layer is responsible for frequency selection, carrier frequency generation, signal detection, modulation, and data encryption.

• Jamming :- Jamming attacks are sever Denial-of-service attacks against wireless medium. This type of attack which interferes with the radio frequencies that the nodes use in a WSN for communication.

Physical Layer Attacks

THREATS AND ATTACKS IN WMNS AND WSNS

Water Torture Attack: - In this attack the attacker pushes a Subscriber Station (SS) to trench its battery or consume computing resources by sending false frames.Man in the Middle Attack :- In this attack an attacker grasp the valid frames and then intentionally resends the frames to the target system. A wireless – specific variation of man-in-the-middle attack is placing a rogue access point within range of wireless stations.Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack :- In the denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, the hacker‘s objective is to render target machines inaccessible by legitimate users.

LINK LAYER ATTACKS

• Unencrypted Management Communication :- Almost all the IEEE 802.16 management messages are still sent unencrypted. The IEEE 802.16-2004 standard does not provide any capability to encrypt management messages.

• Masquerading threat :- By intercepting the management messages an attacker can use the hardware address of another registered device.

• Threats due to Initial Network Entry:- In IEEE 802.16j-2009 no integrity protection for management messages can be made in case of multicast transmissions and in case of initial network entry by a new candidate node.

NETWORK LAYER ATTACKS

• Selective forwarding:- In a selective forwarding attack, malicious nodes may refuse to forward certain messages and simply drop them, ensuring that they are not propagated any further.

• Sinkhole:- In a sinkhole attack, the adversary manipulates the neighboring nodes to attract nearly all the traffic from a particular area through a compromised node and create a sink.

• Wormhole: - The main aim of the wormhole attack is to replay the packet on the other side of the network. This attack is executed by two nodes colluding to form a wormhole.

• Acknowledgment spoofing:- The objective of this attack is to hide the real identity of the attacker.

TRANSPORT LAYER ATTACKS

• FLOODING:- By repeatedly make new connection requests until the resources required by each connection may be exhausted, may reach a maximum limit or may lead to memory exhaustion through flooding. • DESYNCRONIZATION:- De-synchronization refers to the

disruption of an existing connection. An attacker may, for example, repeatedly spoof messages to end host causing the host to request the retransmission of missed frames.

SESSION AND APPLICATION LAYER ATTACKS

• SESSION LAYER :- In Session Layer attack an attacker attempts to hijack an established TCP session between two computers by guessing the sequence numbers and taking out one of the user. The counterattacks can be using encryption techniques, limiting incoming traffic etc.

• APPLICATION LAYER:- Application Layer attacks involve viruses, worms, malicious codes, application abuses. When data being transmitted is unencrypted, it is vulnerable to sniffing as well as attacks against applications

SOLUTIONS FOR THE SECURITY ISSUES IN WMN

• Intrusion Prevention Mechanisms :- Intrusion prevention mechanisms are considered as the principle line of defense against malicious nodes and include encryption, authentication and secure routing. A key management service is responsible for keeping track of bindings between keys and nodes and for assisting the establishment of mutual trust and secure communication between nodes. Existing key management solutions for wireless and wired networks may be classified into the following three typical categories: centralized, decentralized and distributed key updating protocols.

SOLUTIONS FOR THE SECURITY ISSUES IN WMN

• Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) :- Intrusion detection systems are also deployed to provide a second line of defense. Intrusion Detection Systems in wired or wireless networks are used to alert the users about possible attacks, ideally in time to stop the attack or mitigate the damage

• They consist of three functions :- 1) Event monitoring2) Analysis engine3) Response

SOME PROSPECTS FOR FUTURE TRENDS

• Key Management:- As the features of wireless sensor network node resource are limited, asymmetric key system has been considered unsuitable for wireless sensor networks; after elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been proposed, asymmetric key system application in wireless sensor networks has become possible. Compared to the symmetric key system, asymmetric key system has great advantages in terms of management and security keys.

SOME PROSPECTS FOR FUTURE TRENDS

• The Establishment of a Trust Model:- Establishing trust model between nodes can reduce communication overhead between nodes and improve the efficiency of certification to some extent.

• Improved Public Key Algorithm:- The public key algorithm has its advantages in terms of safety, but the calculation is too big and there is some difficulty in resource-constrained wireless sensor networks applications.

Certification

SOME PROSPECTS FOR FUTURE TRENDS

• Multipath Routing Protocol: - In recent years, traditional single-layer sensor network only concerns the effective use of energy node, but it does not consider security issues. The researchers began to focus on multipath routing protocol security and research how to avoid the secure routing protocols which has been the victim node and the potential victim node, but currently the secure routing protocols consider the situation in which the victim node has been detected.

• Routing Protocol Hierarchy:- In addition, due to the particularity of the hierarchical sensor networks structure, they are convenient for security solutions while providing additional management overhead and other issues hierarchy; therefore, routing protocol hierarchy is a research focus in recent years.

Security Routing

PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

• The consequences of poor security in wireless sensor networks are severe. By using well-established principles, appropriate protocols and ciphers, it is possible to build systems that are both secure and efficient. Still there are many ways by which we can improve the performance of security by introducing new techniques which are more advanced and versatile. There are much advancement in this field and in some recent time the techniques whose modified version and some new ones can sort out this problem. To be mentioned, we propose two more techniques which falls under the term cryptography – Improved ECC(Elliptical curve cryptography) and Quantum cryptography

CONCLUSION

• The security of WSNs and WMNs is a big concern for the proper transmission of data and thus many solutions have been proposed for the security issues. The attacks we see in wireless sensor networks are mainly caused by the insertion of false information by the compromised nodes within the network. Wireless Sensor Networks would be widely deployed in future mission-critical applications. As wireless sensor networks continue to grow and become more common, we expect that further expectations of security will be required of these wireless sensor network applications. On the other side WMNS due to their characteristics, such as the open medium, the multi hop nature, and the lack of concentration points where traffic can be analyzed, they pose new challenges in achieving security and thus the threats they proposed should be rectified.

REFERENCES

• 1. Culler, D. E and Hong, W., ―Wireless Sensor Networks‖, Communication of the ACM, Vol. 47, No. 6, June 2004, pp. 30-33.

• Ian F.Akyildiz,Xudong Wang and Weilin Wang, ―wireless mesh networks: a survey,‖ Computer Networks, vol. 47, pp. 445- 487, Jan. 2005.

• J. Yick, B. Mukherjee, and D. Ghosal., Wireless Sensor Network Survey, 2008• J. Paul Walters, Z. Liang, W. Shi, and V. Chaudhary, Wireless Sensor Network

Security: ASurvey, Department of Computer Science Wayne State University.

• S. Tripathy and S. Nandi, Defense against outside attacks in wireless sensor networks, Department of Information Technology, North Eastern Hill University, October 2007