Biblio
Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) are becoming inevitable in this world of high technology as it provides low cost access to broadband services. Moreover, the technologists are doing research to make WMN more reliable and secure. Subsequently, among wireless ad-hoc networking technologies, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is gaining high degree of importance among researchers due to its easy availability in the gadgets and low power consumption. BLE started its journey from version 4.0 and announced the latest version 5 with mesh support capability. BLE being a low power and mesh supported technology is nowadays among the hot research topics for the researchers. Many of the researchers are working on BLE mesh technology to make it more efficient and smart. Apart from other variables of efficiency, like all communication networks, mesh network security is also of a great concern. In view of the aforesaid, this paper provides a comprehensive review on several works associated to the security in WMN and BLE mesh networks and the research related to the BLE security protocols. Moreover, after the detailed research on related works, this paper has discussed the pros and cons of the present developed mesh security mechanisms. Also, at the end after extracting the curx from the present research on WMN and BLE mesh security, this research study has devised some solutions as how to mitigate the BLE mesh network security lapses.
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is the core component in a smart grid that exhibits a highly complex network configuration. AMI shares information about consumption, outages, and electricity rates reliably and efficiently by bidirectional communication between smart meters and utilities. However, the numerous smart meters being connected through mesh networks open new opportunities for attackers to interfere with communications and compromise utilities assets or steal customers private information. In this paper, we present a new DoS attack, called puppet attack, which can result in denial of service in AMI network. The intruder can select any normal node as a puppet node and send attack packets to this puppet node. When the puppet node receives these attack packets, this node will be controlled by the attacker and flood more packets so as to exhaust the network communication bandwidth and node energy. Simulation results show that puppet attack is a serious and packet deliver rate goes down to 20%-10%.
In the security protocols of Efficient Mesh Security Association(EMSA), the key updating strategy is an effective method to ensure the security of communication. For the existing strategy of periodic automatic key updating, the PTK(Pairwise Transit Key) is updated through the complex 4-way handshake to produce each time. Once the update frequency of the PTK is faster, it will have a greater impact on throughput and delay of the network. On this basis, we propose a new strategy of dynamic key updating to ensure the safety and performance of wireless mesh networks. In the new strategy, mesh point(MP) and mesh authenticator(MA) negotiate a random function at the initial certification, and use the PTK which is generated by the 4-way handshake as the initial seed. When the PTK updating cycle comes, both sides generate the new keys using the random function, which do not have to generate a new PTK by complex 4-way handshake. The analysis of performance compared with existing strategies showed that the dynamic key updating strategy proposed in this paper have a larger increase in delay and throughput of the network.