Secure Neighbor Discovery Using Symmetric Link Management in Tactical Sensor Networks

Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol has been proposed to discover neighboring hosts and routers in IPv6 wired or wireless local networks. Even though ND protocol is very useful, it has a weakness to security because it allows a malicious user to impersonate a legitimate host or a router by forging ND protocol messages. To address the security problem, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has proposed SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol. The key functions of SEND protocol include address ownership proof mechanism, ND protocol message protection mechanism, reply attack prevention mechanism, and router authentication mechanism. In this paper, we analyze SEND protocol in the view point of security through several experiments. For this, we implement SEND protocol in IPv6 real system and develop a simulation environment. Based on the experimental results, we also propose a monitoring-based ND message differentiation scheme which is able to make up for security vulnerability of SEND protocol effectively.

Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol has been proposed to discover neighboring hosts and routers in IPv6 wired or wireless local networks. Even though ND protocol is very useful, it has a weakness to security because it allows a malicious user to impersonate a legitimate host or a router by forging ND protocol messages. To address the security problem, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has proposed SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol. The key functions of SEND protocol include address ownership proof mechanism, ND protocol message protection mechanism, reply attack prevention mechanism, and router authentication mechanism. In this paper, we analyze SEND protocol in the view point of security through several experiments. For this, we implement SEND protocol in IPv6 real system and develop a simulation environment. Based on the experimental results, we also propose a monitoring-based ND message differentiation scheme which is able to make up for security vulnerability of SEND protocol effectively.

Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol has been proposed to discover neighboring hosts and routers in IPv6 wired or wireless local networks. Even though ND protocol is very useful, it has a weakness to security because it allows a malicious user to impersonate a legitimate host or a router by forging ND protocol messages. To address the security problem, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has proposed SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol. The key functions of SEND protocol include address ownership proof mechanism, ND protocol message protection mechanism, reply attack prevention mechanism, and router authentication mechanism. In this paper, we analyze SEND protocol in the view point of security through several experiments. For this, we implement SEND protocol in IPv6 real system and develop a simulation environment. Based on the experimental results, we also propose a monitoring-based ND message differentiation scheme which is able to make up for security vulnerability of SEND protocol effectively.

Neighbor Discovery protocol can be used to communicate between neighboring nodes in the MobileIPv6 environment. For a secure Neighbor Discovery protocol, the IETF SEND working group standardized a Secure Neighbor Discovery protocol, and a Cryptographically Generated Address protocol. Neighbor Discovery protocol can be provided with secure functions by adding the RSA signature option and the CGA parameter option. But one drawback of SEND protocol is, it cannot provide the confidentiality of Neighbor Discovery messages. To provide the confidentiality of Secure Neighbor Discovery protocol message in Mobile IPv6 environment, we propose a mechanism that solve the problem by AES encryption algorithm using a symmetric key without a certification authority or any security infrastructure.

In charge of several critical functionalities, the Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) is used by IPv6 nodes to find out nodes on the link, to learn their link-layer addresses to discover routers, and to preserve reachability information about the paths to active neighbors. Given its important and multifaceted role, security and efficiency must be ensured. However, NDP is vulnerable to critical attacks such as spoofing address, denial-of-service (DoS) and reply attack. Thus, in order to protect the NDP protocol, the Secure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) was designed. Nevertheless, SEND's protection still suffers from numerous threats and it is currently incompatible with the context of mobility and especially with the proxy Neighbor Discovery function used in Mobile IPv6. To overcome these limitations, this paper defines a new protocol named Improved Secure Neighbor Discovery (ISEND) which adapt SEND protocol to the context of mobility and extend it to new functionalities. The proposed protocol (ISEND) has been modeled and verified using the Security Protocol ANimator software (SPAN) for the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) which have proved that authentication goals are achieved. Hence, the scheme is safe and efficient when an intruder is present.

Mobile devices apply neighbor discovery (ND) protocols to wirelessly initiate a first contact within the shortest possible amount of time and with minimal energy consumption. For this purpose, over the last decade, a vast number of ND protocols have been proposed, which have progressively reduced the relation between the time within which discovery is guaranteed and the energy consumption. In spite of the simplicity of the problem statement, even after more than 10 years of research on this specific topic, new solutions are still proposed even today. Despite the large number of known ND protocols, given an energy budget, what is the best achievable latency still remains unclear. This paper addresses this question and for the first time presents safe and tight, duty-cycle-dependent bounds on the worst-case discovery latency that no ND protocol can beat. Surprisingly, several existing protocols are indeed optimal, which has not been known until now. We conclude that there is no further potential to improve the relation between latency and duty-cycle, but future ND protocols can improve their robustness against beacon collisions.

The neighbor discovery protocol (NDP) is a stateless protocol facilitating link local communication in IPv6 networks. The nodes employ IPv6 NDP to locate other hosts/routers on the link, cover resolution of link layer addresses, duplicate address detections and track reachability status about paths to active nodes. However, link local communication using NDP is susceptible to some severe attacks, which if neglected leave the network vulnerable. Attackers can spoof source addresses of legitimate nodes by forging NDP messages and propel attacks like Denial of Service (DoS) and Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) leading to failure of IPv6 host initialization. To avert this, RFC 3971 advocates employing Secure Neighbor Discovery (SeND) to make the process inviolable. SeND fortifies message tampering, prevents IPv6 address theft, including protection against replay attacks and enable validation of routers on the link. Although SeND is a robust link layer security mechanism, its practical implementation is reported to have serious shortcomings like cryptographic algorithms which impact computational complexity including bandwidth utilization, as such negate their implementation and adoption. Moreover, the protocol itself fails to provide the confidentiality factor in the network. SeND also falls short of mature unabridged implementations in commercial operating systems and network devices. This paper revisits the protocol implementation and reviews its deployment challenges. This article also discusses some feasible proposals and recommendations for facilitating practical deployment of SeND in IPv6 networks including resource constrained devices like mobile phones.

As an indispensable part of Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are more and more widely used with the rapid development of IoT. The neighbor discovery protocols are the premise of communication between nodes and networking in energy-limited self-organizing wireless networks, and play an important role in WSNs. Because the node energy is limited, neighbor discovery must operate in an energy-efficient manner, that is, under the condition of a given energy budget, the neighbor discovery performance should be as good as possible, such that the discovery latency would be as small as possible and the discovered neighbor percentage as large as possible. The indirect neighbor discovery mainly uses the information of the neighbors that have been found by a pairwise discovery method to more efficiently make a re-planning of the discovery wake-up schedules of the original pairwise neighbor discovery, thereby improving the discovery energy efficiency. The current indirect neighbor discovery methods are mainly divided into two categories: one involves removing the inefficient active slots in the original discovery wake-up schedules, and the other involves adding some efficient active slots. However, the two categories of methods have their own limitations. The former does not consider that this removal operation destroys the integrity of the original discovery wake-up schedules and hence the possibility of discovering new neighbors is reduced, which adversely affects the discovered neighbor percentage. For the latter category, there are still inefficient active slots that were not removed in the re-planned wake-up schedules. The motivation of this paper is to combine the advantages of these two types of indirect neighbor discovery methods, that is, to combine the addition of efficient active slots and the removal of inefficient active slots. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes, for the first time, the concept of virtual nodes in neighbor discovery to maximize the integrity of the original wake-up schedules and achieve the goals of adding efficient active slots and removing inefficient active slots. Specifically, a virtual node is a collaborative group that is formed by nodes within a small range. The nodes in a collaborative group share responsibility for the activating task of one member node, and the combination of these nodes’ wake-up schedules forms the full wake-up schedule of a node that only uses a pairwise method. In addition, this paper proposes a set of efficient group management mechanisms, and the key steps affecting energy efficiency are analyzed theoretically to obtain the energy-optimal parameters. The extended simulation experiments in multiple scenarios show that, compared with other methods, our neighbor discovery protocol based on virtual nodes (VN-NDP) has a significant improvement in average discovery delay and discovered neighbor percentage performance at a given energy budget. Compared with the typical indirect neighbor discovery algorithm EQS, a neighbor discovery with extended quorum system, our proposed VN-NDP method reduces the average discovery delay by up to and increases the discovered neighbor percentage by up to .

Neighbor discovery is a crucial operation frequently executed throughout the life cycle of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Various protocols have been proposed to minimize the discovery latency or to prolong the lifetime of sensors. However, none of them have addressed that all the critical concerns stemming from real WSNs, including communication collisions, latency constraints and energy consumption limitations. In this paper, we propose Spear, the first practical neighbor discovery framework to meet all these requirements. Spear offers two new methods to reduce communication collisions, thus boosting the discovery rate of existing neighbor discovery protocols. Spear also takes into consideration latency constraints and facilitates timely adjustments in order to reduce the discovery latency. Spear offers two practical energy management methods that evidently prolong the lifetime of sensor nodes. Most importantly, Spear automatically improves the discovery results of existing discovery protocols, on which no modification is required. Beyond reporting details of different Spear modules, we also present experiment evaluations on several notable neighbor discovery protocols. Results show that Spear greatly improves the discovery rate from to , and prolongs the sensor nodes lifetime up to times.

The adoption of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) has increased due to the requirements for a larger address space and better suitability for modern networks, such as Internet of Things (IoT) networks, but it also introduces new security challenges. The Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) that supports features like the router discovery and address resolution, is not secured due to its stateless and trust-based feature. The most notable one is the NDP Table Exhaustion attack that consists of overwhelming the network with forged Neighbor Solicitation (NS) and Neighbor Advertisement (NA) packets, inducing neighbor cache overload and denial-of-service (DoS). Current defenses, such as Secure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) or machine learning-based detection models, have significant computational overheads and cannot be adapted to resource-constrained networks, creating a gap in the overall security of IPv6. To address this problem, this research paper suggests a lightweight, flow-based detection framework that integrates an entropy-based analysis with rule-based thresholds to detect NS and NA flooding attacks. The system gathers traffic into flows, entropy checks on key fields such as source Internet Protocol (IP) and network prefix, and alerts on anomalies when the traffic moves out of the normal operation range. It had the average precision of 0.91, average recall of 0.88, and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$F 1$</tex>-score of 0.87, but with minimal overhead and highly deployable in both enterprise and IoT networks.

OF THE THESIS Impact of Neighborhood Discovering and Adaptive Sampling in Wireless Sensor Networks by Eun Kyung Lee Thesis Director: Professor Dario Pompili Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are networks characterized by a dense deployment of sensor nodes. Because of the dense deployment, sensors can make interference when exchanging data messages. Besides these data messages, in location-based routing that uses geographical positions to route messages, there is a Neighborhood Discovery Protocol (NDP). It should periodically broadcast ”Hello” packets to discover neighboring nodes and maintain routing tables updated. This is due to the uncertainty of the wireless environment such as varying radio interference and mobility. Due to the overhead caused by these periodic broadcasts from many nodes in certain radio range, however, NDP may heavily impact on the performance of the routing scheme itself, which in turn could affect end-to-end performance. Although this is an important and challenging problem in WSNs, this impact and the associated tradeoffs have not been fully explored in the literature. Hence, in the first half of this thesis, an analytical and experimental study is conducted to determine how parameters such as power and transmission frequency of neighborhood discovery packets affect the communication process in static and mobile environments.

In the contemporary era of unprecedented innovations such as Internet of Things (IoT), modern applications cannot be imagined without the presence of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Nodes in WSN use neighbour discovery (ND) protocols to have necessary communication among the nodes. Neighbour discovery process is crucial as it is to be done with energy efficiency and minimize discovery latency and maximize percentage of neighbours discovered. The current ND approaches that are indirect in nature are categorized into methods of removal of active slots from wake-up schedules and intelligent addition of new slots. The two methods are found to have certain drawbacks. The first category disturbs original integrity of wake-up schedules leading to reduced chances of discovering new nodes in WSN as neighbours. When second category is followed, it may have inefficient slots in the wake-up schedules leading to performance degradation. Therefore, the motivation behind the work in this paper is that by combining the two categories, it is possible to reap benefits of both and get rid of the limitations of the both. Making a hybrid is achieved by introducing virtual nodes that help maximize performance by ensuring original integrity of wake-up schedules and adding of efficient active slots. Thus a Hybrid Approach to Neighbour Discovery (HAND) protocol is realized in WSN. The simulation study revealed that HAND outperforms the existing indirect ND models.

Network connectivity and link quality information are the fundamental requirements of wireless sensor network protocols to perform their desired functionality. Most of the existing discovery protocols have only focused on the neighbor discovery problem, while a few number of them provide an integrated neighbor search and link estimation. As these protocols require a careful parameter adjustment before network deployment, they cannot provide scalable and accurate network initialization in large-scale dense wireless sensor networks with random topology. Furthermore, performance of these protocols has not entirely been evaluated yet. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive simulation study on the efficiency of employing adaptive protocols compared to the existing nonadaptive protocols for initializing sensor networks with random topology. In this regard, we propose adaptive network initialization protocols which integrate the initial neighbor discovery with link quality estimation process to initialize large-scale dense wireless sensor networks without requiring any parameter adjustment before network deployment. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to provide a detailed simulation study on the performance of integrated neighbor discovery and link quality estimation protocols for initializing sensor networks. This study can help system designers to determine the most appropriate approach for different applications.

From the perspective of media protocol control and routing of directional wireless ad hoc sensors networks, neighbor discovery protocol is an important problem to be solved first. In the past period of time, some methods have been studied on neighbor discovery protocol, but they have a common defect of link collision. The collision is caused by mutual interference of multiple transmitting nodes which are in one reception beam of the receiving node. To solve this problem, we propose a neighbor discovery algorithm using a bi-directional carrier sense collision avoidance and multi subchannels based on a scan-based algorithm (BD-SBA). Based on a scan-based algorithm (SBA), bi-directional carrier sense of the BD-SBA algorithm is performed in the first broadcast step which can reduce the collision of broadcasting the scanning request (SREQ) frames. In the second step (the reply step), the mechanism of multiple subchannels and multiple slots is applied to reduce the collision of the scanning response (SRES) frames. From the analysis and simulation, we can see that nodes using proposed algorithm can discover their neighbor nodes in fewer time. Moreover, the proposed algorithm has better performance for different beamwidths and densely distributed scenes. So it has great significance in engineering application.

On multipacket reception based neighbor discovery in low-duty-cycle wireless sensor networks