Message Injection Research Articles

Securing the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) Against Fake Timestamps

Time distribution mechanisms favored for use in the smart grid, such as precision time protocol (PTP), were not designed with security in mind, and thus suffer several security vulnerabilities. PTP is vulnerable to fake timestamp attacks through master impersonation and sync message injection. Such an attack will synchronize clocks to a false time reference. In this letter, we consider an IEC 61850 substation and propose an approach to detect fake timestamps communicated through false PTP sync messages. This approach builds on top of existing network and system management solutions. We introduce a new simple network management protocol data objects to monitor PTP functionality and detect the existence of fake timestamps in a PTP synchronized network. The approach is implemented on a testbed. The collected results demonstrate its ability to protect against fake timestamp attacks.

SOS: Standard-Compliant and Packet Loss Tolerant Security Framework for ADS-B Communications

The Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) technology, already deployed by the major avionics companies (e.g., QatarAirways and AmericanAirlines), will become mandatory on board of civil and military aircraft flying in Class A, B, and C airspaces by 2020, enabling direct airplanes communications and enhanced flights monitoring. However, ADS-B has been designed without security considerations, thus being vulnerable to a variety of attacks, including message injection and messages order manipulation attacks, that can be easily performed via widely available commercial Software Defined Radios. To address these threats, we present Securing Open Skies (SOS), a standard-compliant, backward-compatible, loss-tolerant, and bandwidth efficient security framework to secure ADS-B communications. SOS leverages the real deployment of densely distributed, participatory ADS-B sensor networks such as OpenSky Network and Flight Radar, and provides message authentication and integrity security services on a time-slot basis, without resorting to any public key cryptography mechanism. Experimental performances obtained through a realistic proof-of-concept, deployed using commercial Ettus Research X310 Software Defined Radios, demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of our solution, even in presence of uniformly at random or burst packet loss events characterizing the ADS-B frequency band. For instance, SOS allows the verification of the authenticity of ADS-B messages requiring less than 50 percent of bandwidth overhead, with a percentage of verifiable slots above 80 percent, even in an highly lossy environment, characterized by a single packet loss probability of 60 percent—the process requiring less than one second: almost one tenth of similar approaches published in the literature. Finally, a thorough comparison against state of the art solutions in the literature highlights the unique security and reliability features enjoyed by SOS, as well as its practical viability.

Extending security horizon through identification authentication and tracking services in hierarchical vehicular networks

The inter-vehicle communication in vehicular ad hoc network must be protected from unauthorized message injection and message alteration of unauthentic vehicles. A lightweight scheme for identification, authentication and tracking of vehicles in hierarchical vehicular ad hoc network is proposed in the present work. This work aims to preserve the basic security features such as authentication, confidentiality, and integrity in presence of attackers whose operational capability is in between mote-class attacker and lap-top class attacker. In the present scheme the communication among the different levels of the hierarchical vehicular ad hoc network is in encrypted form to protect the network from the access of attackers. The performance of the scheme is evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. Both the qualitative and quantitative performance of the proposed scheme is compared with the existing schemes.

Hiding Contextual Information for Defending a Global Attacker

As wireless sensor networks are mostly deployed in harsh and hostile environments, lack of human maintenance, it has become a severe challenge to offer security or privacy service, especially when facing a powerful attacker. For defending a global attacker, dummy message injection methods are employed by every node in WSN to enhance location privacy, which leads to significant overhead. Based on random walk model, we propose a novel scheme Chess-Board Alternation (CBA) which partition WSN into two sets, and each set operates active in an alternating fashion. We also prove CBA’s outstanding performance, including delivery time, energy consumption, and privacy theoretically and experimentally. In comparison with existing approaches, CBA can not only achieve perfect privacy but also decrease energy cost by 50% and the transmission latency from the source to the sink by more than 40%.

An Efficient Merkle-Tree-Based Authentication Scheme for Smart Grid

Smart grid has emerged as the next generation of power grid, due to its reliability, flexibility, and efficiency. However, smart grid faces some critical security challenges such as the message injection attack and the replay attack. If these challenges cannot be properly addressed, an adversary can maliciously launch the injected or replayed message attacks to degrade the performance of smart grid. To cope with these challenging issues, in this paper, we propose an efficient authentication scheme that employs the Merkle hash tree technique to secure smart gird communication. Specifically, the proposed authentication scheme considers the smart meters with computation-constrained resources and puts the minimum computation overhead on them. Detailed security analysis indicates its security strength, namely, resilience to the replay attack, the message injection attack, the message analysis attack, and the message modification attack. In addition, extensive performance evaluation demonstrates its efficiency in terms of computation complexity and communication overhead.

A novel distributed congestion control for bufferless network-on-chip

Bufferless Network-on-Chip (NoC) emerges as an interesting option for NoC design in recent years, which can save considerable router power and area. However, bufferless NoC only works well under low-to-medium load because it becomes more easily congested as message injection rate increases. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed source-throttling congestion control mechanism that relieves the effect of congestion in bufferless NoC under high load, called Cbufferless. The proposed strategy uses a novel congestion detection and control mechanism, computing average deflection rate of routing flit and distributed throttling message injection. Utilizing the new mechanism, the congestion information can be directly obtained inside node, which allows the mechanism to be fully distributed without requiring any transmission of global congestion information among neighbor routers and within a router. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism improves system throughput by up to $$\sim $$ ~ 30 and $$\sim $$ ~ 15.5 %, saves energy consumption by up to $$\sim $$ ~ 40 and $$\sim $$ ~ 19 % than that of baseline and injection rate throttling bufferless NoCs, respectively, and keeps lower message latency under congested load when compared.

DBR: A Simple, Fast and Efficient Dynamic Network Reconfiguration Mechanism Based on Deadlock Recovery Scheme

Dynamic network reconfiguration is described as the process of replacing one routing function with another while the network keeps running. The main challenge is avoiding deadlock anomalies while keeping limitations on message injection and forwarding minimal. Current approaches, whose complexity is so high that their practical applicability is limited, either require the existence of extra network resources like virtual channels, or they affect the performance of the network during the reconfiguration process. In this paper we present a simple, fast and efficient mechanism for dynamic network reconfiguration which is based on regressive deadlock recoveries instead of avoiding deadlocks. The mechanism which is referred to as DBR guarantees a deadlock-free reconfiguration based on wormhole switching (WS) and it does not require additional resources. In this approach, the need for a reliable message transmission has led to a modified WS mechanism which includes additional flits or control signals. DBR allows cycles to be formed and in such conditions when a deadlock occurs, the messages suffer from time-out. Then, this method releases the buffers and channels from the current node and thus the source retransmits the message after a random time gap. Evaluating results reveal that the mechanism shows substantial performance improvements over the other methods and it works efficiently in different topologies with various routing algorithms.

An Essential of Security in Vehicular Ad hoc Network

Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET) are a specific type of wireless ad-hoc networks, formed with short range wireless communication devices, each one representing a vehicle on the road or a static device. Developing applications and protocols for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) poses unique security challenges, induced by the devices being used, the high speed and sporadic connectivity of the vehicles, the high relevance of their geographic location combined with the absence of adequate/reliable means of determining it. Since the last few years VANET have received increased attention as the potential technology to enhance active and preventive safety on the road, as well as travel comfort. Security and privacy are indispensable in vehicular communications for successful acceptance and deployment of such a technology. Generally, attacks cause anomalies to the network functionality. A secure VANET system, while exchanging information should protect the system against unauthorized message injection, message alteration, eavesdropping. This paper is an attempt to highlights the problems occurred in Vehicle Ad hoc Networks and security issues.

Turbo NOC: A Framework for the Design of Network-on-Chip-Based Turbo Decoder Architectures

This paper proposes a general framework for the design and simulation of network-on-chip-based turbo decoder architectures. Several parameters in the design space are investigated, namely, network topology, parallelism degree, the rate at which messages are sent by processing nodes over the network, and routing strategy. The main results of this analysis are as follows: 1) the most suited topologies to achieve high throughput with a limited complexity overhead are generalized de Bruijn and generalized Kautz topologies and 2) depending on the throughput requirements, different parallelism degrees, message injection rates, and routing algorithms can be used to minimize the network area overhead.

The Subset Keys and Identity Tickets (SKIT) Key Distribution Scheme

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> Probabilistic key predistribution schemes (P-KPSs) which place modest demands on hardware are good candidates for securing interactions between resource limited computers. Collusion susceptible P-KPSs are trade-offs between security and complexity. Some facets of complexity include computation, bandwidth, and storage overhead. Metrics for security include resistance to passive eavesdropping attacks, and active message injection attacks. The contributions of this paper are three-fold: 1) a novel P-KPS, the subset keys and identity tickets (SKIT) scheme; 2) a generic KPS model to facilitate comparison of various facets of the complexity of key predistribution schemes; and 3) a new security model to describe the resistance of P-KPSs to active message-injection attacks. The two models are used to show <emphasis emphasistype="boldital">why</emphasis> SKIT has many compelling advantages over existing P-KPSs in the literature. In particular, while placing lower demands on computation, bandwidth and storage overhead, SKIT realizes substantial improvements in resistance to passive and active attacks. </para>

Security and Privacy in VANET to reduce Authentication Overhead for Rapid Roaming Networks

Since the last few years VANET have received increased attention as the potential technology to enhance active and preventive safety on the road, as well as travel comfort. Security and privacy are indispensable in vehicular communications for successful acceptance and deployment of such a technology. Generally, attacks cause anomalies to the network functionality. A secure VANET system, while exchanging information should protect the system against unauthorized message injection, message alteration, eavesdropping. In this paper, various security and privacy issues and challenges are discussed. The various authentication schemes in wireless LAN, VANETS are discussed. Out of various authentication schemes that are used to reduce the overhead in authentication, when roaming proxy reencryption scheme and new proxy re encryption scheme is reviewed in detail. A comparison between the two schemes is done, which shows that the privacy can be maintained better by using new proxy re encryption.

Low-distance path-based multicast routing algorithm for network-on-chips

In this study, a low-distance path-based multicast routing algorithm for network-on-chips (NoCs) and multiprocessor systems-on-chip is proposed. The algorithm, which is based on the mesh topology, makes use of network partitioning, optimised destination ordering and the odd–even turn model adaptive routing technique for both the multicast and unicast messages. Additionally, the algorithm invokes non-congested paths in routing the messages to prevent creating highly congested areas. This is achieved by considering the congestion condition of the input ports. The efficiency of the proposed multicast routing algorithm is evaluated by comparing its performance with those of previously proposed algorithms under both multicast and mixed (mixture of unicast and multicast) traffic models. The results show that the proposed technique has lower average delays and lower average and peak power consumptions compared to those of the other path-based multicasting algorithm for different message injection rates. The technique has a hardware overhead of less than 8%.

Cross-Layer Communication With an Optical Packet Switched Network via a Message Injection Control Interface

Message injection control and queue management for an optical packet switched network is demonstrated via interoperation of a network with an optical interface buffer. In a time-slotted manner, cross-layer signaling is employed between the input buffer and network to dynamically reroute dropped payload packets with multiple wavelength-striped 10-Gb/s channels. At the output of the network, error-free transmission with bit-error-rates less than were confirmed, with an introduced power penalty of 3.5 dB.

A model for analyzing interactions in 2-D mesh wormhole-routed multicomputers

This paper describes a general contention model called the heterogeneous multipath contention model. The model is a representation of arbitrarily overlapped communication paths of jobs that have different message injection rates. Based on this model, we analyze the degradation of communication performance due to multiple interacting jobs in a 2-D mesh wormhole-routed multicomputer system. We compute the contention delay seen by a message on a path in the heterogeneous multipath contention model. A divide-and-conquer strategy divides the problem into several manageable problems of computing the contention delay for the heterogeneous 2-path contention model. In order to verify the analysis of our heterogeneous multipath contention model, we compare our analytic results with a simulation model. In addition, we analyze a contention model in which two jobs have complex internal communication patterns that overlap.

Valved routing: efficient flow control for adaptive nonminimal routing in interconnection networks

Adaptive nonminimal routing (or misrouting) may move messages away from their destinations to temporarily cope with the dynamic load in an interconnection network. In most cases, misrouting is more powerful and flexible than minimal routing, especially under nonuniform load distribution. However, to take advantage of its misrouting, we have to avoid deadlock, livelock, and starvation in the network and to maintain the network performance across all levels of loading. In this paper, we propose a new flow control scheme for misrouting, called valved routing. Valved routing controls message injection and transmission through logical valves associated with the router ports. Designing routers using valved routing requires a proper choice of design parameters. We will discuss how to find the range of feasible design parameters. Issues in implementing routers using valved routing will also be addressed. We have conducted extensive simulations to compare the performance of routers with and without valved routing. Our simulation results show that valved routing has promising performance advantages, at light as well as heavy network load. Compared with the voluntary misrouting, valved routing performs better in network throughput without sacrificing the latency. >

Adaptive deadlock- and livelock-free routing with all minimal paths in torus networks

This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, two new algorithms for deadlock- and livelock-free wormhole routing in the torus network are presented. The first algorithm, called Channels, is for the n-dimensional torus network. This technique is fully-adaptive minimal, that is, all paths with a minimal number of hops from source to destination are available for routing, and needs only five virtual channels per bidirectional link, the lowest channel requirement known in the literature for fully-adaptive minimal worm-hole routing. In addition, this result also yields the lowest buffer requirement known in the literature for packet-switched fully-adaptive minimal routing. The second algorithm, called 4-Classes, is for the bidimensional torus network. This technique is fully-adaptive minimal and requires only eight virtual channels per bidirectional link. Also, it allows for a highly parallel implementation of its associated routing node. In the second part of this paper, four worm-hole routing techniques for the two-dimensional torus are experimentally evaluated using a dynamic message injection model and different traffic patterns and message lengths.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>