Network Security Requirements Research Articles

Cyber-security on smart grid: Threats and potential solutions

The smart grid is one of the most significant applications of the Internet of Things (IoT). As information and communication technologies (ICT) developed and applied in traditional power systems, the improvement of smart grid cyber-physical-systems (CPS) increases too. IoT-based smart grid systems are critical infrastructures, also they have complex architectures and include critical devices. They contain communication systems that can lead to national security deficits, disruption of public order, loss of life or large-scale economic damage when the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the communication is broken down. These huge systems may be vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Therefore, there is a lot of research effort to enhance smart grid security in industry, government, and academia. The security approaches are important to improve solutions against cyber-attacks in smart grid applications. We present a comprehensive survey supported by a wide review of earlier work. Additionally, recent advances and countermeasures are presented on smart grid cyber-security. In this paper, the threats and potential solutions of the IoT-based smart grid are analyzed. We focus on cyber-attack types and provide an in-depth of the cyber-security state of the smart grid. Particularly, we concentrate on the discussion and examination of network vulnerabilities, attack countermeasures, and security requirements. We aim to supply a deep understanding of cyber-security vulnerabilities and solutions and give a guide on future research directions for cyber-security in smart grid applications.

Bio-Inspired Network Security for 5G-Enabled IoT Applications

Every IPv6-enabled device connected and communicating over the Internet forms the Internet of things (IoT) that is prevalent in society and is used in daily life. This IoT platform will quickly grow to be populated with billions or more objects by making every electrical appliance, car, and even items of furniture smart and connected. The 5th generation (5G) and beyond networks will further boost these IoT systems. The massive utilization of these systems over gigabits per second generates numerous issues. Owing to the huge complexity in large-scale deployment of IoT, data privacy and security are the most prominent challenges, especially for critical applications such as Industry 4.0, e-healthcare, and military. Threat agents persistently strive to find new vulnerabilities and exploit them. Therefore, including promising security measures to support the running systems, not to harm or collapse them, is essential. Nature-inspired algorithms have the capability to provide autonomous and sustainable defense and healing mechanisms. This paper first surveys the 5G network layer security for IoT applications and lists the network layer security vulnerabilities and requirements in wireless sensor networks, IoT, and 5G-enabled IoT. Second, a detailed literature review is conducted with the current network layer security methods and the bio-inspired techniques for IoT applications exchanging data packets over 5G. Finally, the bio-inspired algorithms are analyzed in the context of providing a secure network layer for IoT applications connected over 5G and beyond networks.

Trust and Privacy Based Authentication Method for Vertical Handoff Decision in Heterogeneous Network

Next generation wireless networks involve diverse wireless access technologies to support multimedia services to the roaming users with different Quality of Service constraints at anytime and anywhere. The increased number of users and service providers in the integrated network architecture requires authentication mechanism between communication entities to ensure secured handover. The existing security standards of each network are not able to provide most favorable security requirements of the heterogeneous networks because of independent and incompatibility of various wireless networks. Therefore, Trust and Privacy based Multi-attribute Vertical Handoff (TPMVHO) decision algorithm along with Hybrid Genetic Cuckoo Search algorithm to optimize the attributes weight is proposed to select an optimal network for secure handoff mechanism. Simulation results show the reduction in handoff rate, blocking rate and enhanced throughput against Improved Particle swarm optimization based Multi-attribute Vertical Handoff (IPMVHO).

Probe Delay Based Adaptive Port Scanning for IoT Devices with Private IP Address Behind NAT

Recently, the explosive increase in the number of IoT devices makes the IoT becomes extremely large-scaled, and the security of such a large scale IoT emerges as a big challenge. As a classic security technique, the port scan is widely used around the world. However, as IP resources are limited, a large number of devices are located in the LAN or WLAN behind the NAT which cannot be directly accessed by the port scanner. Furthermore, port scanning generated a tremendous number of probe and response packets which may cause heavy traffic load and frequent congestion. To conquer those problems, in this article, we first propose a reverse proxy based NAT penetration system for scanning ports behind NAT. Based on the NAT penetration system, we proposed a probe delay based adaptive scanning algorithm referred to as ProDASA, which adaptively changes port scanning frequency and scanning methods to balance the network performance and security requirements of the IoT. The experiment in a real environment demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed NAT penetration system and the computational simulation with multiple virtual devices shows the advantage of our proposed ProDASA in terms of both network performance and security by comparing with a conventional method.

An intelligent agriculture network security system based on private blockchains

Countries around the world are nowadays actively promoting development in intelligent agriculture. Each of them must develop a specific plan tailored to environmental farming indices of each individual farm, and such information would be both important and sensitive. This is why information in intelligent agriculture requires protection from network security to ensure data privacy and integrity. This study proposes applying dark web technology to ensure the privacy of blockchains and servers. The study will monitor packet transmission frequency in intelligent agriculture to prevent distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. The main features of system include: (1) An identity authentication mechanism, (2) secure transmission of information, (3) establishment of private blockchains, (4) a faster, improved authentication system for blockchain information, and (5) resistance against DDOS attacks. The proposed scheme can safeguard network security for the IoT as well as the servers by way of applying dark web technology, which can avoid exposure of blockchains and server ID addresses and thus in turn lower the risks of DDOS attack damages. Experiment results indicate that the application of lightweight encryption of proposed scheme does indeed improve the authentication speed while also satisfying requirements of network security.

Virtual Security Functions and Their Placement in Software Defined Networks: A Survey

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) are two important technologies gaining prominence thanks to their benefits for improving the flexibility and cost efficiency in networks. These technologies have been utilized extensively for providing new age security solutions in recent years. Through the use of SDN and NFV, network security functions are virtualized and deployed in a hardware-independent manner, thus reducing costs as well as enabling faster innovations and developments. Functions virtualized with NFV such as firewall, deep packet inspection, intrusion detection systems etc. can reside as applications in the SDN architecture. The issue of where to place these functions in the network is an important problem discussed in the literature. When placing these functions, objectives such as efficient use of network resources, energy consumption, cost, network load, delay etc. must be considered for each function, in addition to ensuring that network security requirements are met. This paper provides a critical survey on the placement of virtualized network security functions in software defined networks and identifies open problems in this field. We briefly describe SDN and NFV technologies, touch upon the relationship between them, exemplify and review the most common virtual security functions in SDN. We also examine and compare the studies on the optimal placement of virtual security functions. Finally, we identify several open research challenges in this area and suggest potential future directions to be considered by researchers.

Addressing Network Security

With the need to secure a growing number of devices how is it possible to address the security requirements of today's networks?

Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Study of Security Issues and Defense Mechanisms

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolving global trend in Web-based information architecture aiding in the exchange of services and goods over a network without necessitating human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. It has the potential to revolutionize physical world interaction of individuals and the organizations. The application of IoT can be recognized significantly in many areas such as in healthcare, resource management, learning, knowledge processing, and many more. The practical realization of IoT is met with a plethora of security and privacy challenges that need to be tackled for IoT's successful deployment on a commercially viable large scale. This paper analyzes the security issues related to IoT networks through an analysis of the existing empirical researches to get an insight on the security requirements of the IoT networks. The findings of the study revealed that security threats are one of the biggest and ever-growing challenges for IoT, and it is essential to substantially mitigate them for the success of this platform.

Security Analysis of a Space-Based Wireless Network

With the gradual deployment of the spacebased wireless network, security risks in the data communication between satellites and even the internal structure of a satellite become extremely important. In this article, we use the satellite's internal communications security as an example to illustrate the space network security threats. We first provide a summary of the security requirements of space-based wireless networks. Then three typical attack approaches for satellite platforms based on MIL-STD-1553B bus are described. Subsequently, we present some attack simulation results and suggest some protective mechanisms.

S-Boxes Construction Based on the Cayley Graph of the Symmetric Group for UASNs

Modern block ciphers can be used for designing security schemes to meet the security requirements in underwater acoustic sensor networks. The substitution boxes (S-boxes) used in block ciphers must have good cryptographic properties to resist various attacks. The difficulty in the design of S-boxes is that the cryptographic properties of S-boxes have no obvious distribution. In this paper, we investigate the certain subgraph of the Cayley graph of the symmetric group to get some information about the distribution of the cryptographic properties of S-boxes. Based on the information obtained, an algorithm for designing S-boxes with good cryptographic properties is proposed. The security analysis shows that the preferred S-box constructed by the proposed algorithm has good cryptographic properties.

Enabling Trustworthy Multicast Wireless Services through D2D Communications in 5G Networks

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is considered as one of the key enabling technologies for fifth-generation (5G) networks as it allows data offloading generated by the huge number of connected devices. In this respect, group-oriented services are among the most interesting usage scenarios. Indeed, D2D can improve the performance of the conventional multicast scheme (CMS) in cellular networks, which is known to suffer from low spectral efficiency. Security is a further key field of investigation for 5G systems, as any threat to privacy and security may lead to both deteriorated user experience and inefficient network resources’ utilization. Security issues are even more in focus for D2D connections between devices that are in mutual proximity. To improve the CMS performance and also sustain security requirements of the 5G network, this work proposes a secure D2D data transmission algorithm. Making use of mechanisms such as encryption and signature, this algorithm aims to protect the exchanged data and the privacy of the devices involved in the communication. A simulation campaign conducted using MATLAB shows the ability of the proposed solution to take advantage of the establishment of secure D2D communications and efficiently utilize network resources.

SF-APP

Opportunistic networks are the special class of ad hoc networks where permanent link among the nodes are almost absent and communication occurs when an “opportunity” is found. The opportunistic networks have more diverse features than traditional ad hoc networks, like self-organized nature, intermittent connectivity, store-carry-forward routing mechanism, etc. All these features make opportunistic networks more prone to security threats. This article discusses security challenges and threats to opportunistic networks. Focusing on the specific security requirements of opportunistic networks, proposed is a secure framework for authentication and privacy preservation (SF-APP) for opportunistic networks. The proposed algorithm takes care of authentication, privacy preservation, and trust management. Within this article is a performed security analysis of SF-APP and simulation results show that the proposed framework is capable of fulfilling the security requirements of opportunistic networks.

A STUDY OF BILINEAR MAPS IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

In the past, a large part of security requirements of wireless sensor networks (WSN) were fulfilled by symmetric cryptography systems. But, today by introduction of new needs in these networks and their security development, researchers of security and cryptography try to find new ways to increase efficiency and security of wireless sensor networks. Improving computational power of sensors used in wireless sensor networks made application of public key cryptography in WSN possible. Identity based cryptography is one important type of public key cryptography which using some bilinear functions called pairing functions was seriously applied. In this paper we will look at some researches done to find how to use pairings in wireless sensor networks.

DoS Attacks in Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) defines a highly interconnected network of heterogeneous devices where all kinds of communications seem to be possible, even unauthorized ones. As a result, the security requirement for such network becomes critical whilst common standard Internet security protocols are recognized as unusable in this type of networks, particularly due to some classes of IoT devices with constrained resources. Due to the limitations of energy, computation and storage for sensors, although IoT have been widely deployed in many applications such as military, ecological and health-related areas. It is a critical challenge to present the effective and lightweight security protocol to prevent various attacks for IoT, especially for the denial of service (DoS) attack. Normally, the adversaries compromise sensors and launch the DoS attack by replaying redundant messages or making overdose of fake messages. In this paper, we explore the scope of the DoS attack problem in IoT. First we outline the constraints, security requirements, and then explore types of DoS attacks in IoT.

Lightweight Security and Privacy Preserving Scheme for Smart Grid Customer-Side Networks

Information security and customers’ privacy in smart grid are significant concerns. Existing security and privacy preserving schemes consider that the consumption reports for electricity consumption aggregation and billing purposes are sent periodically. These periodic messages increase the computation and communication burden on restricted-capabilities smart meters. In this paper, we propose a lightweight security and privacy preserving scheme that is based on forecasting the electricity demand for a cluster of houses in the same residential area; it limits the cluster’s connection with electricity utility only when the cluster needs to adjust its total demand. The scheme efficiently satisfies the security and privacy requirements in customer-side networks, i.e., communication between customers and power utility. At the same time, it significantly reduces the communication and computation overhead. Moreover, the proposed scheme utilizes NTRU cryptosystem to further reduce the computation complexity.

Security Challenges for Communications on IOT & Big Data

Internet of Things or “IoT” refers to the highly interconnected network of heterogeneous devices where all kinds of communications seem to be possible, even unauthorized ones. In such a case, the security requirement for such network becomes critical. Presently abundant data is available and it is growing day by day. Big data is a collection of data sets which is very huge in size as well as complex. Presently Big data is one of the most burning topics in IT industry. It is going to play important role in future. Big data provides the new way for data management and use. The paper presents highlights on Internet of things and big data available on it. It also depicts the impacts and importance of these terminologies in the current scenario. Further we discusses the security challenges while we exploit the big data through IoT. Then we discuss various security enhancing techniques while communicating on Internet of things. Keywords: IOT, Big Data, security, communication, Data analytics

A new certificateless multiple key agreement scheme

Recently, by changing security requirements of computer networks, many public key schemes are introduced. One major shortcoming of identity-based cryptosystems is key screw. Certificateless public key cryptosystems were introduced to solve this problem. In this paper, a certificateless, public-key, multiple-key-agreement scheme will be offered which has some significant security properties such as perfect forward secrecy, strong security, and zero-knowledge proof. This scheme produces far more shared hidden keys per session in comparison with many existing schemes. In this paper, the security and the efficiency of the proposed scheme will be compared with some well-known current schemes.

Network Security and Privacy Challenges in Smart Vehicle-to-Grid

Smart vehicle-to-grid (V2G) involves intelligent charge and discharge decisions based on user operational energy requirements, such as desired levels of charging and waiting time. V2G is also supported by information management capabilities enabled by a secure network, such as a reliable privacy-preserving payment system. In this article, we describe the network security and privacy requirements and challenges of V2G applications. We present a new network security architecture to support V2G. We propose a scheme with the following security and privacy-preserving features: anonymous authentication, fine-grained access control, anonymous signatures, information confidentiality, message integrity, remote attestation, and a payment system. This article is oriented toward practitioners interested in designing and implementing secure and privacy-preserving networks for smart V2G applications.

Establishing an Intelligent Transportation System With a Network Security Mechanism in an Internet of Vehicle Environment

The Internet of Vehicle (IoV) utilizes networks to conduct message exchange and related services or application. In recent years, smart cities and IoVs have become areas of interest in the new generation Internet of Things development, especially since the development of intelligent transportation system has focused on bettering traffic conditions. This paper proposes establishing an intelligent transportation system with a network security mechanism in an IoV environment, with emphasis on the following aspects: 1) this paper integrates intelligent transportation systems in traffic signal control to aid emergency vehicles in more promptly arriving at its destination; 2) in the case of traffic incidents, this paper’s approach allows regular vehicles to obtain proof of incident from pertaining authorities and learn about nearby vehicles global positioning system information, such as position and speed, and utilize their car camcorder data for proving purposes; and 3) this paper combines roadside units (RSUs) with traffic signal control and transmits important information to the certificate authority (CA) for storage. Given that RSUs are limited in computation ability and storage space, we can assess and filter the information before sending it to the CA, reducing RSUs computational burden and storage space usage. This paper satisfies IoVs network security requirements of authentication, non-repudiation, conditional anonymity, and conditional untraceability, and, as seen from experiment results, the proposed method is superior to that of other studies.

A Survey of Key Pre-Distribution and Overlay Routing in Unstructured Wireless Networks

Unstructured wireless networks such as mobile ad hoc networks and wireless sensor networks have been rapidly growing in the past decade. Security is known as a challenging issue in such networks in which there is no fixed infrastructure or central trusted authority. Further, node limitations in processing power, storage, and energy consumption add further complexity to addressing security in such networks. While cryptography has proven as an effective solution capable of satisfying most network security requirements, it requires the use of efficient key pre-distribution algorithms compatible with the limitation of unstructured wireless networks. Typically, a key pre-distribution algorithm forms a cryptographic overlay layer above the network routing layer and as such introduces the need for relying on two layers of routing for secure delivery of information. In this paper, we conduct a categorical review of key pre-distribution methods for unstructured wireless networks. We also compare different key pre-distribution schemes in terms of performance and security strength. Finally, we provide an overview of recent overlay routing algorithms relying on key pre-distribution.