Security Issues in Monitoring Medical Disease Through Vehicular Ad hoc Network - Proceedings of All India Seminar on Biomedical Engineering 2012 (AISOBE-2012) - page 142

Fig. 1 Vehicles collect data
from patients and transfer
them to their final destination
Security Goals
To secure an ad hoc network, we consider the following attributes: availability,
confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and nonrepudiation. Availability ensures
the survivability of network services despite denial of service attacks. A denial of
service attack could be launched at any layer of an ad hoc network. On the physical
and media access control layers, an adversary could employ jamming to interfere
with communication on physical channels. On the network layer, an adversary could
disrupt the routing protocol and disconnect the network. On the higher layers, an
adversary could bring down high-level services. One such target is the key man-
agement service, an essential service for any security framework. Confidentiality
ensures that certain information is never disclosed to unauthorized entities. Network
transmission of sensitive information, such as strategic or tactical, medical, military
information, requires confidentiality. Leakage of such information to enemies could
have devastating consequences. Routing information must also remain confidential
in certain cases, because the information might be valuable for enemies to identify
and to locate their targets in a battlefield. Integrity guarantees that a message being
transferred is never corrupted. A message could be corrupted because of benign
failures, such as radio propagation impairment, or because of malicious attacks on
the network. Authentication enables a node to ensure the identity of the peer node it
is communicating with. Without authentication, an adversary could masquerade a
node, thus gaining unauthorized access to resource and sensitive information and
interfering with the operation of other nodes. Finally, nonrepudiation ensures that
the origin of a message cannot deny having sent the message. No repudiation is
useful for detection and isolation of compromised nodes. When a node A receives an
erroneous message from a node B, nonrepudiation allows A to accuse B using this
message and to convince other nodes that B is compromised. There are other security
goals (e.g., authorization) that are of concern to certain applications, but we will not
pursue these issues in this chapter.