A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances, and Future Trends

By Yulong Zou, Jia Zhu, Xianbin Wang, Lajos Hanzo. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2015

1,308 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Due to the broadcast nature of radio propagation, the wireless air interface is open and accessible to both authorized and illegitimate users. This completely differs from a wired network, where communicating devices are physically connected through cables and a node without direct association is unable to access the network for illicit activities. The open communications environment makes wireless transmissions more vulnerable than wired communications to malicious attacks, including both the passive eavesdropping for data interception and the active jamming for disrupting legitimate transmissions. Therefore, this paper is motivated to examine the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity, and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state of the art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. Several physical-layer security techniques are reviewed and compared, including information-theoretic security, artificial-noise-aided security, security-oriented beamforming, diversity-assisted security, and physical-layer key generation approaches. Since a jammer emitting radio signals can readily interfere with the legitimate wireless users, we also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their countermeasures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer, and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/89726009371df933bd1113e0a463449d625ba7cc

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Citations in the corpus

Anatomy of Threats to the Internet of Things (2019, background): “Moreover, researchers in [46] have identified that cross-layer and hybrid security issues are open research challenges in wireless communication.”
A Survey on Security and Privacy of 5G Technologies: Potential Solutions, Recent Advancements, and Future Directions (2020, background): “Later 3G network versions were able to support high data rates and new services such as video call, MMS (Multimedia Message Services), mobile television and mobile Internet.”
Evaluating Critical Security Issues of the IoT World: Present and Future Challenges (2018, background): “The physical layer encryption exploits the features of the physical wireless channel for its security by communications, signal processing, and coding techniques [29].”
A Comprehensive Review of Cyber Security Vulnerabilities, Threats, Attacks, and Solutions (2023, methodology): “Accordingly, the increasing number of wireless devices brings security threats such as cyber criminal activities, malicious attacks, data forging, identity theft, and so on [157] Furthermore, these threats are increasing because of smartphone usage for online banking and personal accounts.”
Integrated Sensing and Communications: Recent Advances and Ten Open Challenges (2023, background): “While some of the existing communication security approaches may be borrowed to secure the sensing network [177], there are still quite a lot of open issues to be addressed.”
A Survey of Device-to-Device Communications: Research Issues and Challenges (2018, background): “efforts have been exploring novel techniques that can minimize interference in order to enable secure and reliable D2D communication [191].”
Security for 5G and Beyond (2019, background): “For instance, [21] and [22] are focused on authentication, [19] and [20] are targeted towards security of physical layer and air interfaces respectively, [18] presents security in access and core networks, presents LTE security and general security requirements of 5G, and [16] covers privacy issues ”
Proactive eavesdropping via cognitive jamming in fading channels (2015, background): “It is observed from (25) and (26) that as the jamming power increases, the variable β decreases accordingly.”
Physical Layer Security for Next Generation Wireless Networks: Theories, Technologies, and Challenges (2017, background): “[159] gave a survey, which summarized the security requirements and security attacks of wireless networks, followed by security protocols and algorithms in existing wireless network standards.”
Covert Communications: A Comprehensive Survey (2023, methodology): “Previously, the information security protection either relied on the steganography [9] or the physical layer security (PLS) [10], [11], i.e., the message encryption in the application layer or the transmission techniques in the physical layer.”
Classifications and Applications of Physical Layer Security Techniques for Confidentiality: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, background): “To this end, physical layer security (PLS),1 [2] the key driving factor for research besides capacity, reliability and delay, emerges as a promising and revolutionizing concept to address the eavesdropping security problem [3]–[6].”