Fake Packets Research Articles

Joint attack detection and secure state estimation of cyber‐physical systems

SummaryThis paper deals with secure state estimation of cyber‐physical systems subject to switching (on/off) attack signals and injection of fake packets (via either packet substitution or insertion of extra packets). The random set paradigm is adopted in order to model, via random finite sets (RFSs), the switching nature of both system attacks and the injection of fake measurements. The problem of detecting an attack on the system and jointly estimating its state, possibly in the presence of fake measurements, is then formulated and solved in the Bayesian framework for systems with and without direct feedthrough of the attack input to the output. This leads to the analytical derivation of a hybrid Bernoulli filter (HBF) that updates in real time the joint posterior density of a Bernoulli attack RFS and of the state vector. A closed‐form Gaussian mixture implementation of the proposed HBF is fully derived in the case of invertible direct feedthrough. Finally, the effectiveness of the developed tools for joint attack detection and secure state estimation is tested on two case studies concerning a benchmark system for unknown input estimation and a standard IEEE power network application.

Avoiding and Isolating Flooding Attack by Enhancing AODV MANET Protocol (AIF_AODV)

Security in MANET is an essential task in preventing the harm that could be caused by malicious nodes in the network. Flooding attack is one of DoS attacks that aim to exhaust the network resources by flooding the network with a lot of fake packets and messages. There are different forms of Flooding attacks, and the most common form is the request one. Request Flooding attack keeps flooding the network with a lot of requests to the fake nodes that do not exist in the network. In this research, we presented a new enhanced AODV protocol AIF AODV that can detect and isolate flooding nodes in the network. NS-2.35 is used to simulate and to prove the efficiency of the proposed technique. The results of the enhanced protocol in terms of Throughput, End to End Delay, PDF, ARE, and NRL are very close to the native AODV without Flooding attack. The comparisons with other models showed that the proposed model AIF_AODV has a better Throughput characteristic.

CPSLP: A Cloud-Based Scheme for Protecting Source Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Multi-Sinks

Source location privacy is a major problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). WSNs are usually deployed in random areas with no protection. The source location reveals valuable information about targets. If an adversary locates the source node by analyzing the traffic mode, a target can be easily attacked. In this paper, a scheme based on the cloud using multi-sinks (CPSLP) is proposed to address the issue of source location privacy. The authors propose a scheme that changes packet destinations randomly in each transmission. In addition, multiple sinks are adopted to create many routing paths. The introduction of an intermediate node renders the routing path more random and flexible. Then, a cloud-shaped fake hotspot is created to add fake packets into the WSN to confuse the adversary and provide a comprehensive privacy location. Each valuable packet is routed through a path that is quite difficult for the hotspot-locating adversary to find directly. Simulation results illustrate that the CPSLP scheme can prevent adversarial capture and maintain a high level of privacy protection at the same time. The energy consumption in this scheme exerts limited influence on the network lifetime compared with a cloud-based scheme and an all-direction random routing algorithm scheme.

FRID: Flood Attack Mitigation Using Resources Efficient Intrusion Detection Techniques in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are a special type of intermittently connected networks (ICN) featured by variable delay, frequent disruption, asymmetric data rates, and high-error rates. The DTNs have been primarily developed for interplanetary networks (IPNs), however, it shows applicability to challenged networks. Thus, solutions devised for security and routing for traditional networks do not apply to DTNs due to its unique nature. Moreover, this paper shows less attention particularly in security and its related strings. In DTNs, malicious nodes launch various attacks that include packet drop, a fake packet, and flood attack. These attacks inevitably overuse scarce resources (bandwidth, buffer, and energy) in DTNs, which leads to low packet delivery ratio and high packet loss ratio. Flood attack is listed in top among the challenging attacks in DTNs. The existing techniques to confront flood attack suffered from high-detection time and low-detection accuracy. This paper proposed novel resources efficient (distributed and intrusion detection system-based) algorithms to mitigate flood attack. The simulation results show considerable improvement in detection time, detection accuracy, and resource consumption, and also show enhanced packet delivery ratio and reduced packet loss ratio.

KCLP: A k-Means Cluster-Based Location Privacy Protection Scheme in WSNs for IoT

While enjoying the convenience brought by the Internet of Things (IoT), people also encounter many problems with wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the foundation of IoT. Security problems are especially of concern. In this article, we focus on location privacy, which is a major security issue in WSNs, and propose a k-means cluster-based location privacy (KCLP) protection scheme for IoT. To protect the source location, fake source nodes are used to simulate the function of the real sources. Then, to protect the sink location privacy, fake sink nodes and a specific transmission pattern are utilized. In order to improve safety time, a k-means cluster is applied to create clusters and fake packets that must pass through the area. Compared to contrasting algorithms, the KCLP scheme can increase the safety time and reduce delay at minor expense in energy consumption.

A source location privacy protection scheme based on ring-loop routing for the IoT

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) has become an integral part of daily activities. However, the connection of numerous devices poses many security challenges for wireless sensor networks, which represent the basis of the IoT. In this paper, we propose a source location privacy protection scheme based on ring-loop routing (SLPRR) for the IoT. To increase the backtracking time of the adversary, we introduce a confounding time-domain transmission to transmit real packets. In addition, fake packets, phantom nodes, and a confounding ring are also utilized to protect the source location privacy. A theoretical analysis and simulation experiments are conducted. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SLPRR increases the safety time without compromising the network lifetime.

A taxonomy on misbehaving nodes in delay tolerant networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are type of Intermittently Connected Networks (ICNs) featured by long delay, intermittent connectivity, asymmetric data rates and high error rates. DTNs have been primarily developed for InterPlanetary Networks (IPNs), however, have shown promising potential in challenged networks i.e. DakNet, ZebraNet, KioskNet and WiderNet. Due to unique nature of intermittent connectivity and long delay, DTNs face challenges in routing, key management, privacy, fragmentation and misbehaving nodes. Here, misbehaving nodes i.e. malicious and selfish nodes launch various attacks including flood, packet drop and fake packets attack, inevitably overuse scarce resources (e.g., buffer and bandwidth) in DTNs. The focus of this survey is on a review of misbehaving node attacks, and detection algorithms. We firstly classify various of attacks depending on the type of misbehaving nodes. Then, detection algorithms for these misbehaving nodes are categorized depending on preventive and detective based features. The panoramic view on misbehaving nodes and detection algorithms are further analyzed, evaluated mathematically through a number of performance metrics. Future directions guiding this topic are also presented.

Energy aware approach for security and power optimization in advance wireless networks of internet of things (IoT)

In the recent years, the advance wireless networks and Internet of Things (IoT) are becoming very prominent in assorted domains. In the traffic system, the problem of congestion control is very common, and it is classically handled by the global positioning systems by the drivers as well as traffic administrative authorities. But as the traffic density is increasing day by day, it is becoming difficult to handle and view all the possibilities in the prospective traffic area where the driver is willing to move. Moreover, the problem of security and integrity is also increasing rapidly as there are number of attacks in VANET and GPS systems being used by the crackers by sending the malicious code or fake packets. Ubiquitous computing is one of the recent technologies that is in the phase of implementation under Internet of Things (IoT). In this research manuscript, the approach to integrate the dynamic key exchange with the Elephant Herd Optimization (EHO) is presented to achieve the higher degree of energy optimization and overall lifetime of the network communication. The key concept of the cluster head shuffling using EHO and inner modules of key exchange are simulated in Contiki-Cooja that is open source simulator for advance wireless networks.

Semantic Security with Practical Transmission Schemes over Fading Wiretap Channels

We propose and assess an on–off protocol for communication over wireless wiretap channels with security at the physical layer. By taking advantage of suitable cryptographic primitives, the protocol we propose allows two legitimate parties to exchange confidential messages with some chosen level of semantic security against passive eavesdroppers, and without needing either pre-shared secret keys or public keys. The proposed method leverages the noisy and fading nature of the channel and exploits coding and all-or-nothing transforms to achieve the desired level of semantic security. We show that the use of fake packets in place of skipped transmissions during low channel quality periods yields significant advantages in terms of time needed to complete transmission of a secret message. Numerical examples are provided considering coding and modulation schemes included in the WiMax standard, thus showing that the proposed approach is feasible even with existing practical devices.

MimiBS: Mimicking Base-Station to Provide Location Privacy Protection in Wireless Sensor Networks

In a wireless sensor network (WSN), sink node/base station (BS) gathers data from surrounding nodes and sends them to a remote server via a gateway. BS holds important data. Therefore, it is necessary to hide its location from an inside/outside attacker. Providing BS location anonymity against a local and global adversary, we propose a novel technique called MimiBS “Mimicking Base-Station”. The key idea is the integration of aggregator nodes (ANs) with sensor nodes (SNs), while fine tuning TTL (time to live) value for fake packets, and setting some threshold value for real packet counter rpctr. MimiBS creates multiple traffic-hotspots (zones), which shifts the focus from BS to the newly created ANs hotspots. Multiple traffic-hotspots confuse the adversary while determining the real BS location information. We defend the BS location information anonymity against traffic analysis attack, and traffic tracing attack. MimiBS gives an illusion of having multiple BSs, and thus, if the attacker knows any about AN, he/she will be deceived between the real BS and ANs. MimiBS outperforms BLAST (base-station location anonymity and security technique), RW (random walk), and SP (shortest path), while conducting routing without fake packets, with fake packets, without energy consideration, and with energy consideration respectively.

An Approach to Defend Global Eavesdropper in Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor networks are used in tracking and monitoring objects. Owing to the wireless nature of communication, the adversary eavesdrops and back traces the origin of the message. The detection of source location information threatens the source node as well as the monitored object and reduces the functionality of the network. Existing approaches hide the location of the source node with fake packets, which is not a cost effective solution for resource-limited sensor networks. Therefore in this work, virtual source-α approach prevents the adversaries from tracing the source location. The virtual source-α approach is based on virtual source based approach which efficiently handles the realistic global eavesdropper. The performance of this approach is compared with the periodic collection and the source simulation approach with respect to the network and source location privacy. The simulation results show that virtual source-α approach performs better than the existing approaches.

Defense against packet collusion attacks in opportunistic networks

Security is a major challenge in Opportunistic Networks (OppNets) because of its characteristics such as an open medium, dynamic topology, no centralized management and absent clear lines of defense. A packet dropping attack is one of the major security threats in OppNets since neither source nor destination nodes have control over the behaviour of intermediate nodes in the network. Consequently, the knowledge of where or when packets are/will be dropped is difficult to gather. In this paper, we present a novel attack and traceback mechanism against a special type of packet dropping attacks – packet collusion attacks, where the malicious node(s) drops some or all packets and then injects new fake packets in their place to mask the packet dropping. Our novel detection and traceback mechanism is based on the concept of a Merkle (or hash) tree and simulation results show it to be highly effective and accurate in terms of detecting attack instances and tracing back to the malicious node(s) in the network that is the attack source.

GRPW-MuS: Geographic Routing to Multiple Sinks in Connected Wireless Sensor Networks

Multiple sinks routing is envisioned as a possible solution to the bottleneck research problem in Wireless Sensor Networ ks (WSN). In addition to focusing on minimizing the energy consumption in a WSN, it is also equally impor tant to design routing protocols that fair ly and evenly distr ibute the networ k traffic; in order to prolong the networ k life time and improve its scalability.In this paper we present an enhancement to the GRPW algor ithm for wireless sensor networ ks. Perfor mance of GRPW algor ithm algor ithm depends heavily on single sink position , we propose a protocol called GRPW-MuS ( Geographic Routing to Multiple Sinks in connected wireless sensor networ ks) based on Multiple Static Sinks, we modified the existing sink location pr ivacy protection scheme by dividing nodes in the networ k containing multiple sink into different levels in which real packets are forwarded to sink belong to corresponding logical levels and the inter mediate node generating fake packets and sending it to fake sinks. Using OMNET++ simulation and the MiXiM framewor k, it is shown that proposed protocol significantly improves the robustness and adapts to rapid topological changes with multiple mobile sinks, while efficiently reducing the communication overhead and the energy consumption.

Analysis of Effect of Flooding on Performance of Ad hoc Network

Mobile Ad hoc networks (MANET) are a new paradigm of networks offering unrestricted mobility without any underlying infrastructure. The network is set up with a group of mobile wireless nodes and is devoid of any dedicated routers or base stations. The wireless nodes move around freely and mutually cooperate with each other in routing and forwarding packets without the support of any fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. The topology is highly dynamic, making the routing procedure more difficult and insecure. In this paper, the performance of the network is analyzed after flooding the network using malicious nodes. The flooding attack is done by the malicious node by sending fake RREQ packets throughout the network. The number of malicious nodes and their position is changed along with various other node characteristics to observe their respective effects on the network performance. The simulation environment is implemented by using the NS-3 network simulator.

Source Anonymity in WSNs against Global Adversary Utilizing Low Transmission Rates with Delay Constraints.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are deployed for many applications such as tracking and monitoring of endangered species, military applications, etc. which require anonymity of the origin, known as Source Location Privacy (SLP). The aim in SLP is to prevent unauthorized observers from tracing the source of a real event by analyzing the traffic in the network. Previous approaches to SLP such as Fortified Anonymous Communication Protocol (FACP) employ transmission of real or fake packets in every time slot, which is inefficient. To overcome this shortcoming, we developed three different techniques presented in this paper. Dummy Uniform Distribution (DUD), Dummy Adaptive Distribution (DAD) and Controlled Dummy Adaptive Distribution (CAD) were developed to overcome the anonymity problem against a global adversary (which has the capability of analyzing and monitoring the entire network). Most of the current techniques try to prevent the adversary from perceiving the location and time of the real event whereas our proposed techniques confuse the adversary about the existence of the real event by introducing low rate fake messages, which subsequently lead to location and time privacy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed techniques provide reasonable delivery ratio, delay, and overhead of a real event's packets while keeping a high level of anonymity. Three different analysis models are conducted to verify the performance of our techniques. A visualization of the simulation data is performed to confirm anonymity. Further, neural network models are developed to ensure that the introduced techniques preserve SLP. Finally, a steganography model based on probability is implemented to prove the anonymity of the techniques.

Sink location privacy protection under direction attack in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks have been widely deployed in military and civilian applications. Due to the nature of the sensor network, it is easy for an adversary to trace the movement of packets and get the sink location. Many ways have been proposed to deal with this problem, most of them provide path diversity. But these techniques always expose direction information. Once adversaries have got the direction information, they can launch a direction attack by deducing the direction of the sink and choosing right paths to trace. To cope with the direction attack, we present an improved scheme based on injecting fake packets and random walk of real packets. In this scheme, real packets do a random walk to hide direction information at a special phase, fake packets are injected in intersection nodes of two or more shortest paths, which can lead adversaries to fake paths. Privacy analysis shows that our scheme has a good performance on protecting sink location. We also examine the delivery time, energy consumption and safe time by simulations.

Catabolism attack and Anabolism defense: A novel attack and traceback mechanism in Opportunistic Networks

Security is a major challenge in Opportunistic Networks (OppNets) because of its characteristics, such as open medium, dynamic topology, no centralized management and absent clear lines of defense. A packet dropping attack is one of the major security threats in OppNets since neither source nodes nor destination nodes have the knowledge of where or when the packet will be dropped. In this paper, we present a novel attack and traceback mechanism against a special type of packet dropping where the malicious node drops one or more packets and then injects new fake packets instead. We call this novel attack a Catabolism attack and we call our novel traceback mechanism against this attack Anabolism defense. Our novel detection and traceback mechanism is very powerful and has very high accuracy. Each node can detect and then traceback the malicious nodes based on a solid and powerful idea that is, hash chain techniques. In our defense techniques we have two stages. The first stage is to detect the attack, and the second stage is to find the malicious nodes. Simulation results show this robust mechanism achieves a very high accuracy and detection rate.

Enhanced Detection and Recovery from Flooding Attack in MANETs using AODV Routing Protocol

Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a self-deliberate data network, where all nodes behave like host or router. MANET is a collection of number of mobile nodes or devices that randomly generate a temporary network. Security is the fundamental requirement in MANET due to its behavior of changing topology, open medium and lack of centralized authentication. This leads to various security attacks in mobile ad hoc network and violate the criteria of routing mechanism. Mobile Ad-hoc network doesn’t need backbone infrastructure support and it is very reliable and also contains the routable networking environment. In this paper, the effect of flooding attack in AODV based network is explained. The network parameters like Throughput, Packet Delivery Fraction (PDF) and End to End Delay are compared with normal network (without flooding attack) and a network with one or more flooder nodes. The performance of network parameters is compared in all the three scenarios. We have proposed a scheme which is finds single or number of malicious nodes in the network and drops fake packets.

MIO: Enhancing Wireless Communications Security Through Physical Layer Multiple Inter-Symbol Obfuscation

Communications security is a critical and increasingly challenging issue in wireless networks. A well-known approach for achieving information-theoretic secrecy relies on deploying artificial noises to blind the intruders’ interception in the physical layer. However, this approach requires a static channel condition for the transmitter and receiver to generate and offset the controllable artificial noise, which can hardly be implemented in real wireless environments. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of symbol obfuscation to defend against the passive eavesdropping attack and fake packet injection attack during the wireless communications. We propose a multiple inter-symbol obfuscation (MIO) scheme, which utilizes a set of artificial noisy symbols (symbols key) to obfuscate the original data symbols in the physical layer. MIO can effectively enhance the wireless communications security. On the one hand, an eavesdropper, without knowing the artificial noisy symbols, cannot correctly decrypt the obfuscated symbols from the eavesdropped packets. On the other hand, a legitimate receiver can easily check the integrity of the symbols key and then reject the fake packets from the received packets. The security analysis reveals that, without considering the initial key, the MIO scheme can achieve information-theoretic secrecy against the passive eavesdropping attack and computational secrecy against the fake packet injection attack. Moreover, we have implemented our approach in a USRP2 testbed and conducted simulations with Simulink tools to validate the effectiveness of MIO in enhancing wireless communications security.

Providing 100% throughput in memory–memory–memory switches with in‐sequence service

The use of buffers in the central stage of memory–memory–memory (MMM) switch can potentially cause the forwarding of packets to the outputs in out-of-sequence order. In this study, the authors present a novel scheduling algorithm, frame-based in-sequence scheduling in MMM switch (FIM3), which can provide 100% throughput and in-sequence service as well. FIM3 adopts a predetermined cyclic shift configuration at the first stage and the oldest-cell-first selection for arbitrations at the second and third stages. Frame-based scheduling algorithm is adopted, and fake packets will be added for an incomplete frame to obtain full. FIM3 is decentralised and requires no speedup. The simulation results show that FIM3 has a better delay performance than padded frame does under uniform traffic, and achieves 100% throughput under non-uniform traffic.