Biblio

The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN), which is a promising technology to promote the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), has been proposed to connect millions of IP-based sensing devices over the open Internet. To support the mobility of these resource constrained sensing nodes, the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been proposed as the standard. Although the standard has specified some issues of security and mobility in 6LoWPANs, the issues of supporting secure group handovers have not been addressed much by the current existing solutions. In this paper, to reduce the handover latency and signaling cost, an efficient and secure group mobility scheme is designed to support seamless handovers for a group of resource constrained 6LoWPAN devices. With the consideration of the devices holding limited energy capacities, only simple hash and symmetric encryption method is used. The security analysis and the performance evaluation results show that the proposed 6LoWPAN group handover scheme could not only enhance the security functionalities but also support fast authentication for handovers.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are being considered as most adequate for deployment in the Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) domain of the smart grid infrastructure because their features such as self-organizing, scalability and cost-efficiency complement the NAN requirements. To enhance the security of the WMNs, the key refreshment strategy for the Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) or the Efficient Mesh Security Association (EMSA) protocols is an efficient way to make the network more resilient against the cyber-attacks. However, a security vulnerability is discovered in the EMSA protocol when using the key refreshment strategy. The first message of the Mesh Key Holder Security Handshake (MKHSH) can be forged and replayed back in the next cycles of the key refreshment leading to a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. In this paper, a simple one-way hash function based scheme is proposed to prevent the unprotected message from being replayed together with an enhancement to the key refreshment scheme to improve the resilience of the MKHSH. The Protocol Composition Logic (PCL) is used to verify the logical correctness of the proposed scheme, while the Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT) is used to evaluate the security functionality against the malicious attacks.