Dr. Ivan Martinovic

"Security in Wireless Networks"

Over the years an extensive set of different security protocols has been developed to facilitate protection of computer networks. Since designing such protocols is a complex and error-prone process, a common practice is to reuse and follow existing concepts and design guidelines which have already been proven as successful, rather than starting from the scratch. However, in spite of these efforts, it seems that secure wireless networks remains an elusive goal.

Probably, the most fundamental reason why wireless networks have been difficult to protect lies in the broadcast nature of wireless communication and the strict resource-constraints of the wireless devices. The wireless communication inherently expands the adversarial toolset to different passive and active attacks, such as traffic monitoring, data injections, and complete or selective communication blocking by frequency jamming attacks. In addition, performance- scarce wireless devices are highly sensitive to cryptographic computations and stateful protocol executions. Their hardware capabilities are heterogeneous to such an extent that even a common key exchange computation, which may be considered trivial for some devices, often times presents a high computational burden for others. The objective of this lecture is therefore to examine the security of wireless networks analysing their properties, security requirements and vulnerabilities, and proposed solutions and their limitations.