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

TL;DR

This survey reviews wireless security challenges, attacks, protocols, and emerging physical-layer security techniques, highlighting unresolved issues and future research directions to enhance wireless network protection.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of wireless security threats, protocols, and physical-layer security advancements, along with future trends and unresolved challenges.

Findings

Analysis of security vulnerabilities across protocol layers

Survey of existing security protocols in standards like Wi-Fi and LTE

Discussion of physical-layer security techniques and jamming counter-measures

Abstract

This paper examines 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. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, 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.