Biblio

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is one of the most popular dynamic topology reconfigurable local wireless network standards. Distributed Denial of Services is one of the most challenging threats in such a network. Flooding attack is one of the forms of DDoS attack whereby certain nodes in the network miss-utilizes the allocated channel by flooding packets with very high packet rate to it's neighbors, causing a fast energy loss to the neighbors and causing other legitimate nodes a denial of routing and transmission services from these nodes. In this work we propose a novel link layer assessment based flooding attack detection and prevention method. MAC layer of the nodes analyzes the signal properties and incorporated into the routing table by a cross layer MAC/Network interface. Once a node is marked as a flooding node, it is blacklisted in the routing table and is communicated to MAC through Network/MAC cross layer interface. Results shows that the proposed technique produces more accurate flooding attack detection in comparison to current state of art statistical analysis based flooding attack detection by network layer.

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new network architecture design that led to the evolution of a network architecture based on data-centric. Questions have been raised about how to compare its performance with the old architecture such as IP network which is generally based on Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). Differs with the old one, source and destination addresses in the delivery of data are not required on the NDN network because the addresses function is replaced by a data name (Name) which serves to identify the data uniquely. In a computer network, a network routing is an essential factor to support data communication. The network routing on IP network relies only on Routing Information Base (RIB) derived from the IP table on the router. So that, if there is a problem on the network such as there is one node exposed to a dangerous attack, the IP router should wait until the IP table is updated, and then the routing channel is changed. The issue of how to change the routing path without updating IP table has received considerable critical attention. The NDN network has an advantage such as its capability to execute an adaptive forwarding mechanism, which FIB (Forwarding Information Base) of the NDN router keeps information for routing and forwarding planes. Therefore, if there is a problem on the network, the NDN router can detect the problem more quickly than the IP router. The contribution of this study is important to explain the benefit of the forwarding mechanism of the NDN network compared to the IP network forwarding mechanism when there is a node which is suffered a hijack attack.

The consistency checking of network security policy is an important issue of network security field, but current studies lack of overall security strategy modeling and entire network checking. In order to check the consistency of policy in distributed network system, a security policy model is proposed based on network topology, which checks conflicts of security policies for all communication paths in the network. First, the model uniformly describes network devices, domains and links, abstracts the network topology as an undirected graph, and formats the ACL (Access Control List) rules into quintuples. Then, based on the undirected graph, the model searches all possible paths between all domains in the topology, and checks the quintuple consistency by using a classifying algorithm. The experiments in campus network demonstrate that this model can effectively detect the conflicts of policy globally in the distributed network and ensure the consistency of the network security policies.

A group of mobile nodes with limited capabilities sparsed in different clusters forms the backbone of Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANET). In such situations, the requirements (mobility, performance, security, trust and timing constraints) vary with change in context, time, and geographic location of deployment. This leads to various performance and security challenges which necessitates a trade-off between them on the application of routing protocols in a specific context. The focus of our research is towards developing an adaptive and secure routing protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks, which dynamically configures the routing functions using varying contextual features with secure and real-time processing of traffic. In this paper, we propose a formal framework for modelling and verification of requirement constraints to be used in designing adaptive routing protocols for MANET. We formally represent the network topology, behaviour, and functionalities of the network in SMT-LIB language. In addition, our framework verifies various functional, security, and Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints. The verification engine is built using the Yices SMT Solver. The efficacy of the proposed requirement models is demonstrated with experimental results.

In Sybil attacks, a physical adversary takes multiple fabricated or stolen identities to maliciously manipulate the network. These attacks are very harmful for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this paper we implemented and evaluated the performance of RPL (Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks) routing protocol under mobile sybil attacks, namely SybM, with respect to control overhead, packet delivery and energy consumption. In SybM attacks, Sybil nodes take the advantage of their mobility and the weakness of RPL to handle identity and mobility, to flood the network with fake control messages from different locations. To counter these type of attacks we propose a trust-based intrusion detection system based on RPL.

Attack graph technique is a common tool for the evaluation of network security. However, attack graphs are generally too large and complex to be understood and interpreted by security administrators. This paper proposes an analysis framework for security attack graphs for a given IT infrastructure system. First, in order to facilitate the discovery of interconnectivities among vulnerabilities in a network, multi-host multi-stage vulnerability analysis (MulVAL) is employed to generate an attack graph for a given network topology. Then a novel algorithm is applied to refine the attack graph and generate a simplified graph called a transition graph. Next, a Markov model is used to project the future security posture of the system. Finally, the framework is evaluated by applying it on a typical IT network scenario with specific services, network configurations, and vulnerabilities.

The false data injection attack (FDIA) is a form of cyber-attack capable of affecting the secure and economic operation of the smart grid. With DC model-based state estimation, this paper analyzes ways of constructing a successful attacking vector to fulfill specific targets, i.e., pre-specified state variable target and pre-specified meter target according to the adversary's willingness. The grid operator's historical reading experiences on meters are considered as a constraint for the adversary to avoid being detected. Also from the viewpoint of the adversary, we propose to take full advantage of the dual concept of the coefficients in the topology matrix to handle with the problem that the adversary has no access to some meters. Effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by numerical experiments on the IEEE-14 benchmark system.

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) is extensively used in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to its ability to transmit IPv6 packet with low bandwidth and limited resources. 6LoWPAN has several operations in each layer. Most existing security challenges are focused on the network layer, which is represented by its routing protocol for low-power and lossy network (RPL). RPL components include WSN nodes that have constrained resources. Therefore, the exposure of RPL to various attacks may lead to network damage. A sinkhole attack is a routing attack that could affect the network topology. This paper aims to investigate the existing detection mechanisms used in detecting sinkhole attack on RPL-based networks. This work categorizes and presents each mechanism according to certain aspects. Then, their advantages and drawbacks with regard to resource consumption and false positive rate are discussed and compared.

The principal mission of Multi-Source Multicast (MSM) is to disseminate all messages from all sources in a network to all destinations. MSM is utilized in numerous applications. In many of them, securing the messages disseminated is critical. A common secure model is to consider a network where there is an eavesdropper which is able to observe a subset of the network links, and seek a code which keeps the eavesdropper ignorant regarding all the messages. While this is solved when all messages are located at a single source, Secure MSM (SMSM) is an open problem, and the rates required are hard to characterize in general. In this paper, we consider Individual Security, which promises that the eavesdropper has zero mutual information with each message individually. We completely characterize the rate region for SMSM under individual security, and show that such a security level is achievable at the full capacity of the network, that is, the cut-set bound is the matching converse, similar to non-secure MSM. Moreover, we show that the field size is similar to non-secure MSM and does not have to be larger due to the security constraint.

RPL is a lightweight IPv6 network routing protocol specifically designed by IETF, which can make full use of the energy of intelligent devices and compute the resource to build the flexible topological structure. This paper analyzes the security problems of RPL, sets up a test network to test RPL network security, proposes a RPL based security routing protocol M-RPL. The routing protocol establishes a hierarchical clustering network topology, the intelligent device of the network establishes the backup path in different clusters during the route discovery phase, enable backup paths to ensure data routing when a network is compromised. Setting up a test prototype network, simulating some attacks against the routing protocols in the network. The test results show that the M-RPL network can effectively resist the routing attacks. M-RPL provides a solution to ensure the Internet of Things (IoT) security.

Software Defined Networks (SDNs) is a new networking paradigm that has gained a lot of attention in recent years especially in implementing data center networks and in providing efficient security solutions. The popularity of SDN and its attractive security features suggest that it can be used in the context of smart grid systems to address many of the vulnerabilities and security problems facing such critical infrastructure systems. This paper studies the impact of different cyber attacks that can target smart grid communication network which is implemented as a software defined network on the operation of the smart grid system in general. In particular, we perform different attack scenarios including DDoS attacks, location highjacking and link overloading against SDN networks of different controller types that include POX, Floodlight and RYU. Our experiments were carried out using the mininet simulator. The experiments show that SDN-enabled smartgrid systems are vulnerable to different types of attacks.

In assessing privacy on online social networks, it is important to investigate their vulnerability to reconnaissance strategies, in which attackers lure targets into being their friends by exploiting the social graph in order to extract victims' sensitive information. As the network topology is only partially revealed after each successful friend request, attackers need to employ an adaptive strategy. Existing work only considered a simple strategy in which attackers sequentially acquire one friend at a time, which causes tremendous delay in waiting for responses before sending the next request, and which lack the ability to retry failed requests after the network has changed. In contrast, we investigate an adaptive and parallel strategy, of which attackers can simultaneously send multiple friend requests in batch and recover from failed requests by retrying after topology changes, thereby significantly reducing the time to reach the targets and greatly improving robustness. We cast this approach as an optimization problem, Max-Crawling, and show it inapproximable within (1 - 1/e + $ε$). We first design our core algorithm PM-AReST which has an approximation ratio of (1 - e-(1-1/e)) using adaptive monotonic submodular properties. We next tighten our algorithm to provide a nearoptimal solution, i.e. having a ratio of (1 - 1/e), via a two-stage stochastic programming approach. We further establish the gap bound of (1 - e-(1-1/e)2) between batch strategies versus the optimal sequential one. We experimentally validate our theoretical results, finding that our algorithm performs nearoptimally in practice and that this is robust under a variety of problem settings.

Underwater acoustic networks is an enabling technology for a range of applications such as mine countermeasures, intelligence and reconnaissance. Common for these applications is a need for robust information distribution while minimizing energy consumption. In terrestrial wireless networks topology information is often used to enhance the efficiency of routing, in terms of higher capacity and less overhead. In this paper we asses the effects of topology information on routing in underwater acoustic networks. More specifically, the interplay between long propagation delays, contention-based channels access and dissemination of varying degrees of topology information is investigated. The study is based on network simulations of a number of network protocols that make use of varying amounts of topology information. The results indicate that, in the considered scenario, relying on local topology information to reduce retransmissions may have adverse effects on the reliability. The difficult channel conditions and the contention-based channels access methods create a need for an increased amount of diversity, i.e., more retransmissions. In the scenario considered, an opportunistic flooding approach is a better, both in terms of robustness and energy consumption.

The wireless boundaries of networks are becoming increasingly important from a security standpoint as the proliferation of 802.11 WiFi technology increases. Concurrently, the complexity of 802.11 access point implementation is rapidly outpacing the standardization process. The result is that nascent wireless functionality management is left up to the individual provider's implementation, which creates new vulnerabilities in wireless networks. One such functional improvement to 802.11 is the virtual access point (VAP), a method of broadcasting logically separate networks from the same physical equipment. Network reconnaissance benefits from VAP identification, not only because network topology is a primary aim of such reconnaissance, but because the knowledge that a secure network and an insecure network are both being broadcast from the same physical equipment is tactically relevant information. In this work, we present a novel graph-theoretic approach to VAP identification which leverages a body of research concerned with establishing community structure. We apply our approach to both synthetic data and a large corpus of real-world data to demonstrate its efficacy. In most real-world cases, near-perfect blind identification is possible highlighting the effectiveness of our proposed VAP identification algorithm.

Control plane distribution on Software Defined Networking enhances security, performance and scalability of the network. In this paper, we propose an efficient architecture for distribution of controllers. The main contributions of the proposed architecture are: i) A controller distributed areas to ensure security, performance and scalability of the network; ii) A single database maintained by a designated controller to provide consistency to the control plane; iii) An optimized heuristic for locating controllers to reduce latency in the control plane; iv) A resilient mechanism of choosing the designated controller to ensure the proper functioning of the network, even when there are failures. A prototype of the proposal was implemented and the placement heuristic was analyzed in real topologies. The results show that connectivity is maintained even in failure scenarios. Finally, we show that the placement optimization reduces the average latency of controllers. Our proposed heuristic achieves a fair distribution of controllers and outperforms the network resilience of other heuristics up to two times better.

Mission assurance requires effective, near-real time defensive cyber operations to appropriately respond to cyber attacks, without having a significant impact on operations. The ability to rapidly compute, prioritize and execute network-based courses of action (CoAs) relies on accurate situational awareness and mission-context information. Although diverse solutions exist for automatically collecting and analysing infrastructure data, few deliver automated analysis and implementation of network-based CoAs in the context of the ongoing mission. In addition, such processes can be operatorintensive and available tools tend to be specific to a set of common data sources and network responses. To address these issues, Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) is leading the development of the Automated Computer Network Defence (ARMOUR) technology demonstrator and cyber defence science and technology (S&T) platform. ARMOUR integrates new and existing off-the-shelf capabilities to provide enhanced decision support and to automate many of the tasks currently executed manually by network operators. This paper describes the cyber defence integration framework, situational awareness, and automated mission-oriented decision support that ARMOUR provides.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has proved to be a promising approach for creating next generation software based network ecosystems. It has provided us with a centralized network provision, a holistic management plane and a well-defined level of abstraction. But, at the same time brings forth new security and management challenges. Research in the field of SDN is primarily focused on reconfiguration, forwarding and network management issues. However in recent times the interest has moved to tackling security and maintenance issues. This work is based on providing a means to mitigate security challenges in an SDN environment from a DDoS attack based point of view. This paper introduces a Multi-Agent based intrusion prevention and mitigation architecture for SDN. Thus allowing networks to govern their behavior and take appropriate measures when the network is under attack. The architecture is evaluated against filter based intrusion prevention architectures to measure efficiency and resilience against DDoS attacks and false policy based attacks.

The focus of this paper is to propose an integration between Internet of Things (IoT) and Video Surveillance, with the aim to satisfy the requirements of the future needs of Video Surveillance, and to accomplish a better use. IoT is a new technology in the sector of telecommunications. It is a network that contains physical objects, items, and devices, which are embedded with sensors and software, thus enabling the objects, and allowing for their data exchange. Video Surveillance systems collect and exchange the data which has been recorded by sensors and cameras and send it through the network. This paper proposes an innovative topology paradigm which could offer a better use of IoT technology in Video Surveillance systems. Furthermore, the contribution of these technologies provided by Internet of Things features in dealing with the basic types of Video Surveillance technology with the aim to improve their use and to have a better transmission of video data through the network. Additionally, there is a comparison between our proposed topology and relevant proposed topologies focusing on the security issue.

Separation of network control from devices in Software Defined Network (SDN) allows for centralized implementation and management of security policies in a cloud computing environment. The ease of programmability also makes SDN a great platform implementation of various initiatives that involve application deployment, dynamic topology changes, and decentralized network management in a multi-tenant data center environment. Dynamic change of network topology, or host reconfiguration in such networks might require corresponding changes to the flow rules in the SDN based cloud environment. Verifying adherence of these new flow policies in the environment to the organizational security policies and ensuring a conflict free environment is especially challenging. In this paper, we extend the work on rule conflicts from a traditional environment to an SDN environment, introducing a new classification to describe conflicts stemming from cross-layer conflicts. Our framework ensures that in any SDN based cloud, flow rules do not have conflicts at any layer; thereby ensuring that changes to the environment do not lead to unintended consequences. We demonstrate the correctness, feasibility and scalability of our framework through a proof-of-concept prototype.

We study coding schemes for multiparty interactive communication over synchronous networks that suffer from stochastic noise, where each bit is independently flipped with probability ε. We analyze the minimal overhead that must be added by the coding scheme in order to succeed in performing the computation despite the noise. Our main result is a lower bound on the communication of any noise-resilient protocol over a synchronous star network with n-parties (where all parties communicate in every round). Specifically, we show a task that can be solved by communicating T bits over the noise-free network, but for which any protocol with success probability of 1-o(1) must communicate at least Ω(T log n / log log n) bits when the channels are noisy. By a 1994 result of Rajagopalan and Schulman, the slowdown we prove is the highest one can obtain on any topology, up to a log log n factor. We complete our lower bound with a matching coding scheme that achieves the same overhead; thus, the capacity of (synchronous) star networks is Θ(log log n / log n). Our bounds prove that, despite several previous coding schemes with rate Ω(1) for certain topologies, no coding scheme with constant rate Ω(1) exists for arbitrary n-party noisy networks.

Named-Data Networking (NDN) is the most prominent proposal for a clean-slate proposal of Future Internet. Nevertheless, NDN routing schemes present scalability concerns due to the required number of stored routes and of control messages. In this work, we present a controller-based routing protocol using a formal method to unambiguously specify, and validate to prove its correctness. Our proposal codes signaling information on content names, avoiding control message overhead, and reduces router memory requirements, storing only the routes for simultaneously consumed prefixes. Additionally, the protocol installs a new route on all routers in a path with a single route request to the controller, avoiding replication of routing information and automating router provisioning. As a result, we provide a protocol proposal description using the Specification and Description Language and we validate the protocol, proving that CRoS behavior is free of dead or live locks. Furthermore, the protocol validation guarantees that the scheme ensures a valid working path from consumer to producer, even if it does not assure the shortest path.

The Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are suffering from network partitioning when there is group mobility and thus cannot efficiently provide connectivity to all nodes in the network. Autonomous Mobile Mesh Network (AMMNET) is a new class of MANET which will overcome the weakness of MANET, especially from network partitioning. However, AMMNET is vulnerable to routing attacks such as Blackhole attack in which malicious node can make itself as intragroup, intergroup or intergroup bridge router and disrupt the network. In AMMNET, To maintain connectivity, network survivability is an important aspect of reliable communication. Maintaning security is a challenge in the self organising nature of the topology. To address this weakness proposed approach measured the performance of the impact of security enhancement on AMMNET with the basis of bait detection scheme. Modified bait approach that will prevent blackhole node entering into the network and helps to maintain the reliability of the network. The proposed scheme uses the idea of Wumpus World concept from Artificial Intelligence. Modified bait scheme will prevent the blackhole attack and secures network.

This study focuses on the spatial context of hacking to networks of Honey-pots. We investigate the relationship between topological positions and geographic positions of victimized computers and system trespassers. We've deployed research Honeypots on the computer networks of two academic institutions, collected information on successful brute force attacks (BFA) and system trespassing events (sessions), and used Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques, to depict and understand the correlation between spatial attributes (IP addresses) and hacking networks' topology. We mapped and explored hacking patterns and found that geography might set the behavior of the attackers as well as the topology of hacking networks. The contribution of this study stems from the fact that there are no prior studies of geographical influences on the topology of hacking networks and from the unique usage of SNA to investigate hacking activities. Looking ahead, our study can assist policymakers in forming effective policies in the field of cybercrime.

Forming, in a decentralized fashion, an optimal network topology while balancing multiple, possibly conflicting objectives like cost, high performance, security and resiliency to viruses is a challenging endeavor. In this paper, we take a game-formation approach to network design where each player, for instance an autonomous system in the Internet, aims to collectively minimize the cost of installing links, of protecting against viruses, and of assuring connectivity. In the game, minimizing virus risk as well as connectivity costs results in sparse graphs. We show that the Nash Equilibria are trees that, according to the Price of Anarchy (PoA), are close to the global optimum, while the worst-case Nash Equilibrium and the global optimum may significantly differ for small infection rate and link installation cost. Moreover, the types of trees, in both the Nash Equilibria and the optimal solution, depend on the virus infection rate, which provides new insights into how viruses spread: for high infection rate τ, the path graph is the worst- and the star graph is the best-case Nash Equilibrium. However, for small and intermediate values of τ, trees different from the path and star graphs may be optimal.

Content delivery such as P2P or video streaming generates the main part of the Internet traffic and Content Centric Network (CCN) appears as an appropriate architecture to satisfy the user needs. However, the lack of scalable routing scheme is one of the main obstacles that slows down a large deployment of CCN at an Internet-scale. In this paper we propose to use the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to decouple data plane and control plane and present SRSC, a new routing scheme for CCN. Our solution is a clean-slate approach using only CCN messages and the SDN paradigm. We implemented our solution into the NS-3 simulator and perform simulations of our proposal. SRSC shows better performances than the flooding scheme used by default in CCN: it reduces the number of messages, while still improves CCN caching performances.