Biblio

In this paper, physical-layer security (PLS) of an underlay cognitive radio network (CRN) operating over cascaded Rayleigh fading channels is examined. In this scenario, a secondary user (SU) transmitter communicates with a SU receiver through a cascaded Rayleigh fading channel while being exposed to eavesdroppers. By harvesting energy from the SU transmitter, a cooperating jammer attempts to ensure the privacy of the transmitted communications. That is, this harvested energy is utilized to generate and spread jamming signals to baffle the information interception at eavesdroppers. Additionally, two scenarios are examined depending on the manner in which eavesdroppers intercept messages; colluding and non-colluding eavesdroppers. These scenarios are compared to determine which poses the greatest risk to the network. Furthermore, the channel cascade effect on security is investigated. Distances between users and the density of non-colluding eavesdroppers are also investigated. Moreover, cooperative jamming-based energy harvesting effectiveness is demonstrated.

To bring Internet-grade security to billions of IoT devices and make them first-class Internet citizens, IoT devices must move away from pre-shared keys to digital certificates. Public Key Infrastructure, PKI, the digital certificate management solution on the Internet, is inevitable to bring certificate-based security to IoT. Recent research efforts has shown the feasibility of PKI for IoT using Internet security protocols. New and proposed standards enable IoT devices to implement more lightweight solutions for application layer security, offering real end-to-end security also in the presence of proxies.In this paper we present LICE, an application layer enrollment protocol for IoT, an important missing piece before certificate-based security can be used with new IoT standards such as OSCORE and EDHOC. Using LICE, enrollment operations can complete by consuming less than 800 bytes of data, less than a third of the corresponding operations using state-of-art EST-coaps over DTLS. To show the feasibility of our solution, we implement and evaluate the protocol on real IoT hardware in a lossy low-power radio network environment.

Physical-layer security (PLS) for an underlay cognitive radio network (CRN)-based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) over cascaded κ-µ fading channels is investigated. The network is composed of a pair of secondary users (SUs), a primary user (PU) receiver, and an eavesdropper attempting to intercept the data shared by the SUs. To improve the SUs’ data transmission security, we assume a full-duplex (FD) SU destination, which employs energy harvesting (EH) to extract the power required for generating jamming signals to be emitted to confound the eavesdropper. Two scenarios are presented and compared; harvesting and non-harvesting eavesdropper. Moreover, a trade-off between the system’s secrecy and reliability is explored. PLS is studied in terms of the probability of non-zero secrecy capacity and the intercept probability, whereas the reliability is studied in terms of the outage probability. Results reveal the great impact of jamming over the improvement of the SUs’ secrecy. Additionally, our work indicates that studying the system’s secrecy over cascaded channels has an influence on the system’s PLS that cannot be neglected.

Quantitative analysis of security properties in wireless communication systems is an important issue; it helps us get a comprehensive view of security and can be used to compare the security performance of different systems. This paper analyzes the security of future wireless communication system from an information-theoretic point of view and proposes an overall security metric. We demonstrate that the proposed metric is more reasonable than some existing metrics and it is highly sensitive to some basic parameters and helpful to do fine-grained tuning of security performance.

We address secure resource allocation for the energy harvesting (EH) based 5G cooperative cognitive radio networks (CRNs). To guarantee that the size-limited secondary users (SUs) can simultaneously send the primary user's and their own information, we assume that SUs are equipped with orthogonally dual-polarized antennas (ODPAs). In particular, we propose, develop, and analyze an efficient resource allocation scheme under a practical non-linear EH model, which can capture the nonlinear characteristics of the end-to-end wireless power transfer (WPT) for radio frequency (RF) based EH circuits. Our obtained numerical results validate that a substantial performance gain can be obtained by employing the non-linear EH model.

One of the critical threats menacing the Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CSS) in Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs) is the Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification (SSDF) reports, which can deceive the decision of Fusion Center (FC) about the Primary User (PU) spectrum accessibility. In CSS, each CR user performs Energy Detection (ED) technique to detect the status of licensed frequency bands of the PU. This paper investigates the performance of different hard-decision fusion schemes (OR-rule, AND-rule, and MAJORITY-rule) in the presence of Always Yes and Always No Malicious User (AYMU and ANMU) over Rayleigh and Gaussian channels. More precisely, comparative study is conducted to evaluate the impact of such malicious users in CSS on the performance of various hard data combining rules in terms of miss detection and false alarm probabilities. Furthermore, computer simulations are carried out to show that the hard-decision fusion scheme with MAJORITY-rule is the best among hard-decision combination under AYMU attacks, OR-rule has the best detection performance under ANMU.

Wireless networks are very significant in the present world owing to their widespread use and its application in domains like disaster management, smart cities, IoT etc. A wireless network is made up of a group of wireless nodes that communicate with each other without using any formal infrastructure. The topology of the wireless network is not fixed and it can vary. The huge increase in the number of wireless devices is a challenge owing to the limited availability of wireless spectrum. Opportunistic spectrum access by Cognitive radio enables the efficient usage of limited spectrum resources. The unused channels assigned to the primary users may go waste in idle time. Cognitive radio systems will sense the unused channel space and assigns it temporarily for secondary users. This paper discusses about the recent trends in the two most important aspects of Cognitive radio namely spectrum sensing and security.

Cognitive radio systems aim to solve the issue of spectrum scarcity through implementation of dynamic spectrum management and cooperative spectrum access. However, the structure of such systems introduced unique types of vulnerabilities and attacks, one of which is spectrum sensing data falsification attack (SSDF). In such attacks malicious users provide incorrect observations to the fusion center of the system, which may result in severe quality of service degradation and interference for licensed users. In this paper we investigate this type of attacks and propose a combined approach to their mitigation. On the first step a reputational method is used to isolate the initially untrustworthy nodes, on the second step specialized q-out-of-m fusion rule is utilized to mitigate the remains of attack. In this paper we present theoretical analysis of the proposed combined method.

The wireless communication is a backbone for a development of a nation. But spectrum is finite resource and issues like spectrum scarcity, loss of signal quality, transmission delay, raised in wireless communication system due to growth of wireless applications and exponentially increased number of users. Secondary use of a spectrum using Software Defined Radio (SDR) is one of the solutions which is also supported by TRAI. The spectrum sensing is key process in communication based on secondary use of spectrum. But energy consumption, added delay, primary users security are some threats in this system. Here in this paper we mainly focused on throughput optimization in secondary use of spectrum based on optimal sensing time and number of Secondary users during cooperative spectrum sensing in Cognitive radio networks.

Fifth-generation (5G) network demands of higher data rate, massive user connectivity and large spectrum can be achieve using Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) scheme. The integration of cognitive feature spectrum sensing with SCMA can enhance the spectrum efficiency in a heavily dense 5G wireless network. In this paper, we have investigated the primary user detection performance using SCMA in Centralized Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CCSS). The developed model can support massive user connectivity, lower latency and higher spectrum utilization for future 5G networks. The simulation study is performed for AWGN and Rayleigh fading channel. Log-MPA iterative receiver based Log-Likelihood Ratio (LLR) soft test statistic is passed to Fusion Center (FC). The Wald-hypothesis test is used at FC to finalize the PU decision.

Wireless technology is rapidly proliferating. Devices such as Laptops, PDAs and cell-phones gained a lot of importance due to the use of wireless technology. Nowadays there is also a huge demand for spectrum allocation and there is a need to utilize the maximum available spectrum in efficient manner. Cognitive Radio (CR) Network is one such intelligent radio network, designed to utilize the maximum licensed bandwidth to un-licensed users. Cognitive Radio has the capability to understand unused spectrum at a given time at a specific location. This capability helps to minimize the interference to the licensed users and improves the performance of the network. Routing protocol selection is one of the main strategies to design any wireless or wired networks. In Cognitive radio networks the selected routing protocol should be best in terms of establishing an efficient route, addressing challenges in network topology and should be able to reduce bandwidth consumption. Performance analysis of the protocols helps to select the best protocol in the network. Objective of this study is to evaluate performance of various cognitive radio network routing protocols like Spectrum Aware On Demand Routing Protocol (SORP), Spectrum Aware Mesh Routing in Cognitive Radio Networks (SAMER) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) with and without black hole attack using various performance parameters like Throughput, E2E delay and Packet delivery ratio with the help of NS2 simulator.

Current physical layer authentication (PLA) mechanisms are mostly designed for static communications, and the accuracy degrades significantly when used in dynamic scenarios, where the network environments and wireless channels change frequently. To improve the authentication performance, it is necessary to update the hypothesis test models and parameters in time, which however brings high computational complexity and authentication delay. In this paper, we propose a lightweight cross-layer authentication scheme for dynamic communication scenarios. We use multiple characteristics based PLA to guarantee the reliability and accuracy of authentication, and propose an upper layer assisted method to ensure the performance stability. Specifically, upper layer authentication (ULA) helps to update the PLA models and parameters. By properly choosing the period of triggering ULA, a balance between complexity and performance can be easily obtained. Simulation results show that our scheme can achieve pretty good authentication performance with reduced complexity.

We present a covert (low probability of detection) communication scheme that exploits the node multiplicity and channel variations in wireless broadcast networks. The transmitter hides the covert (private) message by superimposing it onto a non-covert (public) message such that the total transmission power remains the same whether or not the covert message is transmitted. It makes the detection of the covert message impossible unless the non-covert message is decoded. We exploit the multiplicity of non-covert messages (users) to provide a degree of freedom in choosing the non-covert message such that the total detection error probability (sum of the probability of false alarm and missed detection) is maximized. We also exploit the channel variation to minimize the throughput loss on the non-covert message by sending the covert message only when the transmission rate of the non-covert message is low. We show that the total detection error probability converges fast to 1 as the number of non-covert users increases and that the total detection error probability increases as the transmit power increases, without requiring a pre-shared secret among the nodes.

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a promising platform to solve the spectrum shortage problem, in which auction based mechanisms have been extensively studied due to good spectrum allocation efficiency and fairness. Recently, Sybil attacks were introduced in DSA, and Sybil-proof spectrum auction mechanisms have been proposed, which guarantee that each single secondary user (SU) cannot obtain a higher utility under more than one fictitious identities. However, existing Sybil-poof spectrum auction mechanisms achieve only Sybil-proofness for SUs, but not for primary users (PUs), and simulations show that a cheating PU in those mechanisms can obtain a higher utility by Sybil attacks. In this paper, we propose TSUNAMI, the first Truthful and primary user Sybil-proof aUctioN mechAnisM for onlIne spectrum allocation. Specifically, we compute the opportunity cost of each SU and screen out cost-efficient SUs to participate in spectrum allocation. In addition, we present a bid-independent sorting method and a sequential matching approach to achieve primary user Sybil-proofness and 2-D truthfulness, which means that each SU or PU can gain her maximal utility by bidding with her true valuation of spectrum. We evaluate the performance and validate the desired properties of our proposed mechanism through extensive simulations.

Security and privacy of smart grid communication data is crucial given the nature of the continuous bidirectional information exchange between the consumer and the utilities. Data security has conventionally been ensured using cryptographic techniques implemented at the upper layers of the network stack. However, it has been shown that security can be further enhanced using physical layer (PHY) methods. To aid and/or complement such PHY and upper layer techniques, in this paper, we propose a PHY design that can detect and locate not only an active intruder but also a passive eavesdropper in the network. Our method can either be used as a stand-alone solution or together with existing techniques to achieve improved smart grid data security. Our machine learning based solution intelligently and automatically detects and locates a possible intruder in the network by reusing power line transmission modems installed in the grid for communication purposes. Simulation results show that our cost-efficient design provides near ideal intruder detection rates and also estimates its location with a high degree of accuracy.

In this paper, we investigate the local secure connectivity in terms of the probability of existing a secure wireless connection between two legitimate users and the isolated security probability of a legitimate user in stochastic wireless networks. Specifically, the closed-form expressions of the probability that there is a secure wireless communication between two legitimate users are derived first. Then, based on these equations, the corresponding isolated secure probability are given. The characteristics of local secure connectivity are examined in four scenarios combined from two wireless channel conditions (deterministic/Rayleigh fading) and two eavesdropper configurations (non-colluding/colluding). All the derived mathematical equations are validated by the Monte-Carlo simulation. The obtained numerical results in this paper reveal some interesting features of the impact of eavesdropper collusion, wireless channel fading, and density ratio on the secure connection probability and the isolated security probability of legitimate user in stochastic networks.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) model in clustering as an approach to achieve higher network scalability in distributed cognitive radio networks. Specifically, it analyzes the effects of RL parameters, namely the learning rate and discount factor in a volatile environment, which consists of member nodes (or secondary users) that launch attacks with various probabilities of attack. The clusterhead, which resides in an operating region (environment) that is characterized by the probability of attacks, countermeasures the malicious SUs by leveraging on a RL model. Simulation results have shown that in a volatile operating environment, the RL model with learning rate α= 1 provides the highest network scalability when the probability of attacks ranges between 0.3 and 0.7, while the discount factor γ does not play a significant role in learning in an operating environment that is volatile due to attacks.

Cognitive Radio is a prominent solution for effective spectral resource utilization. The rapidly growing device to device (D2D) communications and the next generation networks urge the cognitive radio networks to facilitate wideband spectrum sensing in order to assure newer spectral opportunities. As Nyquist sampling rates are formidable owing to complexity and cost of the ADCs, compressive sampling approaches are becoming increasingly popular. One such approach exploited in this paper is the Modulated Wideband Converter (MWC) to recover the spectral support. On the multiple measurement vector (MMV) framework provided by the MWC, threshold based Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) and Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL) algorithms are employed for support recovery. We develop a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that assists a beginner to simulate the RF front-end of a MWC and thereby enables the user to explore support recovery as a function of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), number of measurement vectors and threshold. The GUI enables the user to explore spectrum sensing in DVB-T, 3G and 4G bands and recovers the support using OMP or SBL approach. The results show that the performance of SBL is better than that of OMP at a lower SNR values.

In this paper, we outline a novel, forward error correction-based information hiding technique for adaptive rate wireless communication systems. Specifically, we propose leveraging the functionality of wireless local area network modulation and coding schemes (MCS) and link adaptation mechanisms to significantly increase covert channel throughput. After describing our generalized information hiding model, we detail implementation of this technique within the IEEE 802.11ad, directional multi-Gigabit standard. Simulation results demonstrate the potential of the proposed techniques to develop reliable, high-throughput covert channels under multiple MCS rates and embedding techniques. Covert channel performance is evaluated in terms of the observed packet error ratio of the underlying communication system as well as the bit error ratio of the hidden data.

Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) is an experimental transport protocol designed to primarily reduce connection establishment and transport latency, as well as to improve security standards with default end-to-end encryption in HTTPbased applications. QUIC is a multiplexed and secure transport protocol fostered by Google and its design emerged from the urgent need of innovation in the transport layer, mainly due to difficulties extending TCP and deploying new protocols. While still under standardisation, a non-negligble fraction of the Internet's traffic, more than 7% of a European Tier1-ISP, is already running over QUIC and it constitutes more than 30% of Google's egress traffic [1].

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are state-of-the-art communication environments that offer various applications with distinct requirements. However, security in CPS is a nonnegotiable concept, since without a proper security mechanism the applications of CPS may risk human lives, the privacy of individuals, and system operations. In this paper, we focus on PHY-layer security approaches in CPS to prevent passive eavesdropping attacks, and we propose an integration of physical layer operations to enhance security. Thanks to the McEliece cryptosystem, error injection is firstly applied to information bits, which are encoded with the forward error correction (FEC) schemes. Golay and Hamming codes are selected as FEC schemes to satisfy power and computational efficiency. Then obtained codewords are transmitted across reliable intermediate relays to the legitimate receiver. As a performance metric, the decoding frame error rate of the eavesdropper is analytically obtained for the fragmentary existence of significant noise between relays and Eve. The simulation results validate the analytical calculations, and the obtained results show that the number of low-quality channels and the selected FEC scheme affects the performance of the proposed model.

The internet of things (IoT) is the popular wireless network for data collection applications. The IoT networks are deployed in dense or sparse architectures, out of which the dense networks are vastly popular as these are capable of gathering the huge volumes of data. The collected data is analyzed using the historical or continuous analytical systems, which uses the back testing or time-series analytics to observe the desired patterns from the target data. The lost or bad interval data always carries the high probability to misguide the analysis reports. The data is lost due to a variety of reasons, out of which the most popular ones are associated with the node failures and connectivity holes, which occurs due to physical damage, software malfunctioning, blackhole/wormhole attacks, route poisoning, etc. In this paper, the work is carried on the new routing scheme for the IoTs to avoid the connectivity holes, which analyzes the activity of wireless nodes and takes the appropriate actions when required.

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) has recently become one of the highly active research areas for wireless networking. Since VANET is a multi-hop wireless network with very high mobility and intermittent connection lifetime, it is important to effectively handle the data dissemination issue in this rapidly changing environment. However, the existing TCP/IP implementation may not fit into such a highly dynamic environment because the nodes in the network must often perform rerouting due to their inconsistency of connectivity. In addition, the drivers in the vehicles may want to acquire some data, but they do not know the address/location of such data storage. Hence, the named data networking (NDN) approach may be more desirable here. The NDN architecture is proposed for the future Internet, which focuses on the delivering mechanism based on the message contents instead of relying on the host addresses of the data. In this paper, a new protocol named roadside unit (RSU) assisted of named data network (RA-NDN) is presented. The RSU can operate as a standalone node [standalone RSU (SA-RSU)]. One benefit of deploying SA-RSUs is the improved network connectivity. This study uses the NS3 and SUMO software packages for the network simulator and traffic simulator software, respectively, to verify the performance of the RA-NDN protocol. To reduce the latency under various vehicular densities, vehicular transmission ranges, and number of requesters, the proposed approach is compared with vehicular NDN via a real-world data set in the urban area of Sathorn road in Bangkok, Thailand. The simulation results show that the RA-NDN protocol improves the performance of ad hoc communications with the increase in data received ratio and throughput and the decrease in total dissemination time and traffic load.

Wireless Networks-on-Chips (NoCs) have emerged as a panacea to the non-scalable multi-hop data transmission paths in traditional wired NoC architectures. Using low-power transceivers in NoC switches, novel Wireless NoC (WiNoC) architectures have been shown to achieve higher energy efficiency with improved peak bandwidth and reduced on-chip data transfer latency. However, using wireless interconnects for data transfer within a chip makes the on-chip communications vulnerable to various security threats from either external attackers or internal hardware Trojans (HTs). In this work, we propose a mechanism to make the wireless communication in a WiNoC secure against persistent jamming based Denial-of-Service attacks from both external and internal attackers. Persistent jamming attacks on the on-chip wireless medium will cause interference in data transfer over the duration of the attack resulting in errors in contiguous bits, known as burst errors. Therefore, we use a burst error correction code to monitor the rate of burst errors received over the wireless medium and deploy a Machine Learning (ML) classifier to detect the persistent jamming attack and distinguish it from random burst errors. In the event of jamming attack, alternate routing strategies are proposed to avoid the DoS attack over the wireless medium, so that a secure data transfer can be sustained even in the presence of jamming. We evaluate the proposed technique on a secure WiNoC in the presence of DoS attacks. It has been observed that with the proposed defense mechanisms, WiNoC can outperform a wired NoC even in presence of attacks in terms of performance and security. On an average, 99.87% attack detection was achieved with the chosen ML Classifiers. A bandwidth degradation of \textbackslashtextless;3% is experienced in the event of internal attack, while the wireless interconnects are disabled in the presence of an external attacker.

In Cooperative Networks based on simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), relay nodes collect the energy of radio signals received from source node and transmit the information of source nodes to destination nodes, which not only prolongs the service life of energy-constrained nodes, but also improves the ability of long-distance transmission of information. Due to the openness of energy harvesting, there may be eavesdropping users with malicious decoding. In order to study the security performance of the Cooperative Networks based on SWIPT, this paper mainly studies the physical layer security performance of this network, derives and simulates the expression of system security outage probability and throughput. The simulation results show that the system security performance is mainly influenced by time allocation parameter of SWIPT and decreases with the increase of target rate.