Defending against Internal Attacks in Healthcare-Based WSNs

In view of the spatiotemporal limitations of traditional healthcare services, the use of wireless communication has become one of the main development directions for the medical system. Compared with the traditional methods, applying the potential and benefits of the wireless sensor networks has more advantages such as low cost, simplicity, and flexible data acquisition. However, due to the limited resources of the individual wireless sensor nodes, traditional security solutions for defending against internal attacks cannot be directly used in healthcare based wireless sensor networks. To address this issue, a negative binomial distribution trust with energy consideration is proposed in this study. The proposed method is lightweight and suitable to be operated on the individual healthcare sensors. Simulations show that it can effectively deal with the internal attacks while taking the energy saving into consideration.

BCEAD: A Blockchain-Empowered Ensemble Anomaly Detection for Wireless Sensor Network via Isolation Forest

The distributed deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) makes the network more convenient, but it also causes more hidden security hazards that are difficult to be solved. For example, the unprotected deployment of sensors makes distributed anomaly detection systems for WSNs more vulnerable to internal attacks, and the limited computing resources of WSNs hinder the construction of a trusted environment. In recent years, the widely observed blockchain technology has shown the potential to strengthen the security of the Internet of Things. Therefore, we propose a blockchain-based ensemble anomaly detection (BCEAD), which stores the model of a typical anomaly detection algorithm (isolated forest) in the blockchain for distributed anomaly detection in WSNs. By constructing a suitable block structure and consensus mechanism, the global model for detection can iteratively update to enhance detection performance. Moreover, the blockchain guarantees the trust environment of the network, making the detection algorithm resistant to internal attacks. Finally, compared with similar schemes, in terms of performance, cost, etc., the results prove that BCEAD performs better.

A Data Driven Trust Mechanism Based on Blockchain in IoT Sensor Networks for Detection and Mitigation of Attacks

Utilization of smart applications in various domains is facilitated pervasively by sensor nodes (SN) that are connected in a wireless manner and a number of smart things. Hazards due to internal and external attacks exist along with the advantages of the smart things and its applications. Security measures are influenced by three main factors namely scalability, latency and network lifespan, without which mitigation of internal attacks is a challenge. The deployment of SN based Internet of things (IoT) is decentralized in nature. However, centralized solutions and security measures are provided by most researchers. A data driven trust mechanism based on blockchain is presented in this paper as a decentralized and energy efficient solution for detection of internal attacks in IoT powered SNs. In grey and black hole attack settings, the message overhead is improved using the proposed model when compared to the existing solutions. In both grey and black hole attacks, the time taken for detection of malicious nodes is also reduced considerably. The network lifetime is improved significantly due to the enhancement of these factors.

A Blockchain-Based Multi-Mobile Code-Driven Trust Mechanism for Detecting Internal Attacks in Internet of Things

A multitude of smart things and wirelessly connected Sensor Nodes (SNs) have pervasively facilitated the use of smart applications in every domain of life. Along with the bounties of smart things and applications, there are hazards of external and internal attacks. Unfortunately, mitigating internal attacks is quite challenging, where network lifespan (w.r.t. energy consumption at node level), latency, and scalability are the three main factors that influence the efficacy of security measures. Furthermore, most of the security measures provide centralized solutions, ignoring the decentralized nature of SN-powered Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. This paper presents an energy-efficient decentralized trust mechanism using a blockchain-based multi-mobile code-driven solution for detecting internal attacks in sensor node-powered IoT. The results validate the better performance of the proposed solution over existing solutions with 43.94% and 2.67% less message overhead in blackhole and greyhole attack scenarios, respectively. Similarly, the malicious node detection time is reduced by 20.35% and 11.35% in both blackhole and greyhole attacks. Both of these factors play a vital role in improving network lifetime.

Trust-Based Attack and Defense in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

As a key component of the information sensing and aggregating for big data, cloud computing, and Internet of Things (IoT), the information security in wireless sensor network (WSN) is critical. Due to constrained resources of sensor node, WSN is becoming a vulnerable target to many security attacks. Compared to external attacks, it is more difficult to defend against internal attacks. The former can be defended by using encryption and authentication schemes. However, this is invalid for the latter, which can obtain all keys of the network. The studies have proved that the trust management technology is one of effective approaches for detecting and defending against internal attacks. Hence, it is necessary to investigate and review the attack and defense with trust management. In this paper, the state-of-the-art trust management schemes are deeply investigated for WSN. Moreover, their advantages and disadvantages are symmetrically compared and analyzed in defending against internal attacks. The future directions of trust management are further provided. Finally, the conclusions and prospects are given.

Intrusion prevention with attack traceback and software-defined control plane for campus networks

As traditional networks, the software-defined campus network also suffers from intrusion attacks. Current solutions for intrusion prevention cannot meet the requirements of the campus network. Existing methods of attack traceback are either limited to specific protocols or incur high overhead. To protect the data center (DC) of the campus network from internal and external attacks, we propose an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) based on the coordinated control between the detection engine, the attack traceback agent, and the software-defined control plane. Our solution includes a novel algorithm to infer the best switch port for defending different attacks of varied scales based on the inverse HSA (Header Space Analysis) and the global view of the software-defined controller. The proposed scheme can effectively and timely block the malicious traffic not only protecting victim hosts from attacks but also preventing the whole network from suffering unwanted transmission burden. The proposed IPS is deployed on the bypass of the DC switch and collects network traffic by port mirroring. Compared with the traditional serial deployment, the new design helps defend the DC internal attacks, reduce the probability of network congestion, and avoid the single point of failure. The experimental results show that the overhead of our IPS is very low, which enables it to meet the real-time requirements. The average defense time is between 10 and 14 ms for the data center internal attacks of different scales. For external attacks, the maximum defense time is about 76 ms for a large-scale network with 100 switches.

Efficient travelling-mode quantum key agreement against participant’s attacks

Quantum key agreement (QKA) is to negotiate a final key among several participants fairly and securely. In this paper, we show that some existing travelling-mode multiparty QKA protocols are vulnerable to internal participant’s attacks. Dishonest participants can exploit a favorable geographical location or collude with other participants to predetermine the final keys without being discovered. To resist such attacks, we propose a new travelling-mode multiparty QKA protocol based on non-orthogonal Bell states. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed protocol is secure against both external and internal attacks, and can achieve higher efficiency compared with existing travelling-mode multiparty QKA protocols. Finally we design an optical platform for each participant, and show that our proposed protocol is feasible with current technologies.