Ochirkhand Erdene-Ochir

Enhancing RPL Resilience Against Routing Layer Insider Attacks

To gather and transmit data, low cost wireless devices are often deployed in open, unattended and possibly hostile environment, making them particularly vulnerable to physical attacks. Resilience is needed to mitigate such inherent vulnerabilities and risks related to security and reliability. In this paper, Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is studied in presence of packet dropping malicious compromised nodes. Random behavior and data replication have been introduced to RPL to enhance its resilience against such insider attacks. The classical RPL and its resilient variants have been analyzed through Cooja simulations and hardware emulation. Resilient techniques introduced to RPL have enhanced significantly the resilience against attacks providing route diversification to exploit the redundant topology created by wireless communications. In particular, the proposed resilient RPL exhibits better performance in terms of delivery ratio (up to 40%), fairness and connectivity while staying energy efficient.

An experimental performance evaluation and compatibility study of the Bluetooth low energy based platform for ECG monitoring in WBANs

A long term healthcare monitoring system requires battery operated devices with low-power technologies. Researchers tried to adapt various short-range technologies for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) in ubiquitous health monitoring. The classical Bluetooth is known for its greedy power consumption, IrDA and NFC require line-of-sight conditions, and ANT has weak coexistence features and interference issues. A typical choice remains ZigBee/6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4 based solutions in WBANs because of their low-power consumption. However, the recently proposed Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) announced more compelling features in various aspects. Only few studies have been published supporting these claims on BLE. In this paper, we present a BLE based remote healthcare monitoring platform and we study its compatibility for ECG monitoring. ECG data requires continuous and real-time transmissions, making it particularly challenging for resource constrained devices. In our system, a BLE112 module from Bluegiga and a BLE USB dongle are used for WBAN. The performance of the system is evaluated experimentally and the results showed good potential of this proposed BLE platform in meeting the main QoS requirements of medical applications in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet error rate, while staying energy efficient.

Feasibility and performance evaluation of a 6LoWPAN-enabled platform for ubiquitous healthcare monitoring

Technology has revolutionized medical practices by enabling more convenient and non-intrusive monitoring of patients health, leading to next generation ubiquitous healthcare u-healthcare. The exploitation of the Internet protocol version 6 addressing space along with the miniaturization of electronic devices has fostered providing interoperability and connectivity of wearable sensor devices in wireless body area networks to the Internet of Things. In this paper, we propose to integrate the IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network 6LoWPAN to the u-healthcare monitoring system architecture. The main objective is to study the feasibility of the 6LoWPAN-enabled platform in real-world scenarios dealing with medical data. The performance evaluation of this platform is carried out initially through simulations using OMNet++ and then supported by an experimental study using sensor motes and a customized micro-computing unit. Performance metrics such as throughput, end-to-end delay, packet error rate, and energy consumption are investigated under acute health conditions, where patients health information has to be sent continuously and at maximum rate to the care provider. The obtained results show that the proposed 6LoWPAN solution fulfills the main quality of service requirements of u-healthcare applications. Copyright

A theoretical framework of resilience: Biased random walk routing against insider attacks

This paper focuses on the resilience of routing protocols against malicious insiders willing to disrupt communications. Previous study showed that introducing randomness and data replication enhances the resilience of routing protocols. It makes them unpredictable for an attacker and provides route diversification. We propose a theoretical framework of the resilience based on biased random walks on a torus lattice. The objective is to evaluate analytically the influence of bias and data replication introduced to random walks. The bias allows to decrease the route length, thus reducing the probability of a data packet to meet a malicious insider along the route; however, it also decreases the degree of randomness (entropy). When combined with data replication, the reliability is improved thanks to route diversity despite an additional overhead in terms of energy consumption. The main goal is to provide a good tradeoff between shortest path and route diversity for a reasonable cost.

Network coding versus replication based resilient techniques to mitigate insider attacks for smart metering

The main focus of this paper is the resilience of communication protocols for data gathering in distributed, large scale, and dense networks. In our previous work, we have proposed the resilient methods based on random behavior and data replications to improve route diversification, thus to take advantage of redundant network structure. Following these previous methods, we propose in this paper a new resilient method based on network coding techniques to improve resilience in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for smart metering applications. More precisely, using our resilience metric based on a performance surface, we compare several variants of a well-known gradient based routing protocol with the previous methods (random routing and packet replications) and the new proposed methods (two network coding techniques). The proposed methods outperformed the previous methods in terms of data delivery success even in the presence of high attack intensity.

Routing resilience evaluation for smart metering: Definition, metric and techniques

The operations of smart metering heavily rely on the communication network for efficient data gathering, thus eliminating manual meter reading. Smart electronic devices are deployed in open, unattended and possibly hostile environment such as consumers home and office areas, making them particularly vulnerable to physical attacks. Resilience is needed to mitigate such inherent vulnerabilities and risks related to security and reliability. In this article, a general overview of the resilience including definition, metric and resilient techniques relevant for smart metering is presented. A quantitative metric, visual and meaningful, based on the graphical representation is adopted to compare routing protocols in the sense of resilience against active insider attacks. Five well-known routing protocols from the main categories have been studied through simulations and their resilience is evaluated according to the given metric. Resilient techniques introduced to these protocols have enhanced significantly the resilience against attacks providing route diversification.