Formal Foundations for Wireless Network Agility

Abstract

Wireless is a key components in most today's network infrastructures. Yet, it is highly susceptible to networks attacks because wireless communication and infrastructure (such as Access point and clients) can be easily discovered and targeted. Particularly, the static nature of the wireless AP topology and its configuration offers a significant advantage to adversaries to identify network targets and plan devastating attacks such as denial of service or eavesdropping. This is critically important in hostile military environment in which soldiers depends on wireless infrastructure for communication and coordination. More specifically, in the current structure of hotspot wireless networks, the access point assignment as well as the traffic route between source and destination is fixed. This static AP association offers a significant advantage for adversaries to gather information and launch attacks such as eavesdrop or DoS attacks on certain network flows. There are a number of existing dynamic protocols in wireless networks such as randomized multi-path routing and node status scheduling. The main objective of these protocols is to increase network resiliency in case of dynamic ad hoc network topology. However, in these protocols, the node status and route selection are predictable, which makes the network vulnerable to the adversary. This project proposes anew layer of dynamicity using random AP mutation to increase the wireless agility and defense.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 12, 2016
Accession Number
AD1063508

Entities

People

  • Ehab Al-Shaer

Organizations

  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Ad Hoc Networks
  • Cellular Networks
  • Computer Access Control
  • Data Links
  • Denial Of Service Attack
  • Eavesdropping
  • Energy Consumption
  • Equations
  • Heterogeneous Networks
  • Mesh Networks
  • Moving Targets
  • Network Architecture
  • Network Protocols
  • Network Topology
  • Software Defined Radio
  • Wireless Communications
  • Wireless Networks

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Cybersecurity.
  • Radio communications and signal processing.
  • Strategic Security Studies