Security Challenges of Wireless Communications Networks: A Survey

摘要

Despite the gains offered by wireless communications networks, such as portability, flexibility, increased productivity, roaming capabilities, cheap installation costs, and many more, the security of wireless networks has continued to be of great challenge and concern. Currently, wireless communications vulnerabilities are on the increase due to the higher demand for higher data rates, the need for advanced services and that of roaming, and the huge deployment of services across the globe. Consequently, this has created serious challenging issues in the security of wireless systems and applications in wireless environments. Incidentally, wireless networks and handheld devices are exposed to the same level of vulnerabilities and risks with that of conventional wired networks. However, nowadays, the risks and threats associated with wireless networks have taken a new dimension, ostensibly because the communication medium, the airwave, of wireless networks is openly exposed to intruders, who take advantage of that to launch malicious attacks such as denial-of-service attacks, identity theft, violation of privacy rights, insertion of viruses or malicious codes to disrupt operations, passive eavesdropping for data interception and active jamming attacks to disrupt legitimate transmissions. Again, intruders also by-pass firewall-protection to gain access to sensitive data communicated between two wireless devices. This paper therefore critically examines the security vulnerabilities and risks incurred by the inherent open nature of wireless networks as well as suggest ways of improvements. The paper first presents a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks. Next, it conducts a survey of the existing security protocols and envisions some standard algorithms for wireless networks such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, LTE-systems, and so on. It further presents the state-of-the-art security-control measures for securing the open communication environment against eavesdroppers. This is followed by an analysis of the various jamming attacks based on jamming effectiveness and complexity and a proposition of some anti-jamming techniques.