Pervasive computing is an exciting and blooming research field, in which innovative techniques and applications are continuously emerging and aim to provide ambient and personalized services to users with high quality. Ad hoc networks are wireless, self-organizing systems formed by co-operating nodes within communication range of each other that form temporary networks. Their topology is dynamic, decentralized, ever changing and the nodes may move around arbitrarily. The last few years have witnessed a wealth of research ideas on ad hoc networking that are moving rapidly into implemented standards. Technology under development for ad hoc networks and pervasive computing is making important steps toward this end goal possible. However, the security concerns remain a serious impediment to widespread adoption. The underlying radio communication medium for wireless network provides serious exposure to attacks against wireless networks. Wireless ad hoc networks usually cannot depend on traditional infrastructure found in enterprise environments such as dependable power sources, high bandwidth, continuous connectivity, common network services, well-known membership, static configuration, system administration, and physical security. Finally, throw in malicious adversaries with Byzantine collusion threats and you have a very interesting and challenging problem. Without adequate security, enterprises will not be able to profit from the use of wireless ad hoc networks and pervasive computing environment, defense organizations might be unable to guarantee the safety of their personnel in battlefield scenarios, and wireless ad hoc networks and pervasive computing will remain on the drawing board even if the other problems associated with them are solved. This special issue is focused on various aspects of security in ad hoc networks and pervasive computing research and development to report both in-depth research and applications-oriented works. The special issue is intended to foster state-of-the-art research in the area of security in ad hoc networks and pervasive computing. The aim of this special issue is to present a collection of high quality research papers that report the latest research advances in security of ad hoc. In this special issue, we selected seven papers, which can demonstrate advanced works in this field. A detailed overview of the selected works is given below. The first paper, An RC4-Based Lightweight Protocol for Secure Data Transmission on Resource-Constrained Devices, presents a simple, lightweight, but robust security protocol based on the backward property of RC4 stream cipher. The proposed protocol provides data confidentiality, data authentication, data integrity, and data freshness with low overhead and simple operation, allows packets be received in an arbitrary order, achieves semantic security, and does not require frequent key renew. The second paper, PAPA-UIC: A Design Approach and a Framework for Secure Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, proposes a new design approach and a framework for securing a practical type of MANETs. The framework is named PAPA-UIC. The paper proposes a secure routing protocol and solutions to general problems of identity-based cryptography. The routing protocol has several improvements over existing ones. The third paper, RFIDGuard: A Lightweight Privacy and Authentication Protocol for Passive RFID Tags, introduces a protocol which requires little computation and achieves both privacy and authentication simultaneously. The lightweight and secure nature of the RFIDGuard protocol make it particularly suitable for supply chain management. The fourth paper, Using Hidden Markov Model to Detect Rogue Access Points, proposes a statistical based approach to detect rogue access points using a Hidden Markov Model, which is applied to passively measure packet-header data collected at a gateway router. The main idea is to process the sequence of packet traces in order to distinguish the normal packets from the abnormal ones. The approach is scalable and non-intrusive, requiring little deployment cost and effort, and is easy to manage and maintain. The fifth paper, Defending Sybil Attacks Based on Neighboring Relations in Wireless Sensor Networks, develops a mechanism to protect a WSN from Sybil attacks without using any authentication-based method. Furthermore, the detection approach requires no specialized hardware or support devices. The feature that a malicious node creates many fake identities is exploited to distinguish legitimate nodes from Sybil/malicious nodes. Since all of the fake identities forged by the same malicious node are associated with the same physical device, they will have the same legitimate neighbors. Therefore, by collecting the neighboring information of the suspected victim of the Sybil attacks, the legitimate nodes which are the neighbors of the malicious nodes can be determined. In contrast to existing protection schemes, this approach has no requirement for shared keys, secret information, or special hardware support. The sixth paper, An Autonomous Attestation Token to Secure Mobile Agents in Disaster Response, introduces the Autonomous Attestation Token (AAT), a hardware token for mobile computing devices that is capable of guaranteeing the trusted state of a limited set of devices without relying on a networked service. The paper proposes a Local Attestation protocol with user interaction that in conjunction with the AAT prevents unauthorized access to an emergency mobile agent platform. In addition, the paper sketches a possible solution which integrates trusted computing to leverage ad hoc networks and peer-to-peer systems to provide a robust communication platform. The seventh paper, Building Advanced Applications with the Belgian eID, introduces the Belgian Electronic Identity Card. The card enables Belgian citizens to digitally prove their identity and to sign electronic documents. This paper presents two reusable extensions to the Belgian eID technology that opens up new opportunities for application developers. First, a secure and ubiquitously accessible remote storage service is presented. Second, it is shown how the eID card can be used to issue new certificates. The feasibility and reusability of both extensions are validated through the development of several applications in different domains. In conclusion, this issue of Security in Ad hoc offers a groundbreaking view into the recent advances in secure ad hoc networks. This issue offers both academic and industry appeal the former as a basis toward future research directions, and the latter toward viable commercial applications. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief, Professor HsiaoHwa Chen for his advice, patience, and encouragements since the beginning until the final stage. Special thanks go to Michelle in Wiley during the production. We thank all anonymous reviewers who spent much of their precious time reviewing all the papers. Their timely reviews and comments greatly helped us select the best papers in this special issue. We also thank all authors who have submitted their papers for consideration for this issue. We hope you will enjoy reading the great selection of papers in this issue.
Gabriele Monti, Gianluca Moro, Marco Rosetti, Giacomo Tufano
The work presents a decentralized protocol that allows self-organization of autonomous wireless devices in mobile mesh networks. In the resulting infrastructure the routing and information services are provided in a peer-to- peer fashion. Both services are performed through multi- hop radio transmissions among participant nodes with no fixed infrastructure required and avoiding to use broadcast of messages. Since links among nodes may be continuously destroyed and created, as a consequence of nodes movement and/or variations in connectivity range (e.g. due to temporary obstacles), our protocol is based on virtual network addresses which are dynamically assigned to groups of nodes (called islands). Routing requests are performed through unicast transmissions when traveling among islands and exploiting wireless overhearing when involving members of the same island (in- island routing). We will demonstrate that assigning virtual coordinates to groups of nodes guarantees network flexibility with a reasonable amount of overheard and that the amount of radio transmissions required is scalable with the number of nodes. Simulations have shown that the proposed solution can generate reliable networks, despite the unpredictable topology, assuming the use of devices with common radio range connectivity moving at pedestrian velocity.
Abstract : Mobile airborne networks deployed and used by the armed forces face significant challenges in balancing security concerns with reliably servicing the needs of the forces dependent on it. These issues are complicated by the ever-changing collaborative environments that these networks are tasked to support. The Zero Knowledge Protocol (ZKP) is a powerful technique that replaces the portion of a traditional credential-based key management system where credentials are exchanged. Instead, in ZKPs a proof of the existence of the credential is sent, allowing the receiver to develop absolute confidence that the user has a valid credential, without exposing the credential to risk of compromise. Based on the results of this research, we assert that it may be possible to construct a ZKP scheme with strong anonymity given any identification protocol and a shared-key update scheme.
In this paper, we propose a novel cryptography for ad hoc network security. In this cryptography, we present a new digital signature algorithm for identity authentication and key agreement scheme. The identity authentication is validated by zero-knowledge proof, and the identity authentication process includes the key agreement process, so the cryptography has high efficiency. Because of the fully distributed characteristics of ad hoc network, our security scheme has no central administration in the on-line process. The security analysis for our scheme indicated that the scheme can withstand the man-in-middle attack and message replay attack. The security of the scheme is guaranteed by the intractability of computing discrete logarithm
This paper describes a new protocol for authentication in ad-hoc networks. The protocol has been designed to meet specialized requirements of ad-hoc networks, such as lack of direct communication between nodes or requirements for revocable anonymity. At the same time, a ad-hoc authentication protocol must be resistant to spoofing, eavesdropping and playback, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The article analyzes existing authentication methods based on the Public Key Infrastructure, and finds that they have several drawbacks in ad-hoc networks. Therefore, a new authentication protocol, basing on established cryptographic primitives (Merkle's puzzles and zero-knowledge proofs) is proposed. The protocol is studied for a model ad-hoc chat application that provides private conversations.
The restrictions of resources present in the environment of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have forced the adaptation of the existing tools for guaranteeing security basic services in this new framework. The set of restrictions associated to computational, communication and power supply resources is the main barrier when providing them with security mechanisms. The solutions outlined so far for authentication based on classical tools have result non satisfactory for this setting. That is why examining the possibility of using advanced protocols should be explored. Following this trend, a new authentication protocol specifically designed for this setting is proposed in this work. A hard on average problem and an NP-complete one, belonging both to graph theory, are combined in order to design simultaneously an admission control protocol (ACP) and a node authentication protocol (NAP) using identification schemes belonging to the set of zero-knowledge interactive proofs (ZKIP). Using this technique is a way to avoid the nuisances derived from the utilization of PKT.
Philipp Obreiter, Birgitta König‐Ries, Michael Klein
In the context of mobile and wireless devices, an information system is no longer a centralized component storing all the relevant data nor is it a decentralized component governed by a common authority. Rather, the information spread across huge numbers of autonomous mobile and wireless devices owned by independent organizations and individuals can be regarded as a highly dynamic, virtual information system. For this vision to become reality, the autonomous devices involved need to be motivated to cooperate. This cooperation needs to occur not only on the application layer, but, depending on the network architecture, also on the lower layers from the link layer on upwards. In this report, we investigate on which protocol layers cooperation is needed and what constitutes uncooperative behavior. We then identify necessary properties of incentive schemes that encourage cooperation and discourage uncooperative behavior. In this context, we examine remuneration types that are a major constituent of incentive schemes. Finally, using the example of ad hoc networks, the most challenging technical basis of a wireless information system, we compare existing incentive schemes to these characteristics.