Wireless networking security: open issues in trust, management, interoperation and measurement

Abstract

The pervasive availability and wide usage of wireless networks with different kinds of topologies, techniques and protocol suites have brought with them a need to improve security mechanisms. The design, development and evaluation of security techniques must begin with a thorough analysis of the requirements and a deeper understanding of the approaches that are practical within the system constraints. In this paper, we investigate the recent advances in wireless security from theoretical foundations to evaluation techniques, from network level management to end user trust inference and from individual protocol to hybrid systems. We identify the open security issues associated with trust, management, interoperation and measurement. These problems, whose solutions are different in nature and scale from their companions in wired networks, must be properly addressed to establish confidence in the security of wireless networking environments.