Secure Collaborative Services for Wireless Mesh Networks

[Overview]   [Students]   [Publications]   [Presentations]   [Software]   [Courses]   [Resources]   [Funding]  

Overview

Group-oriented services are envisioned to be an important class of application in the environment of wireless mesh networks. This project focuses on developing scalable, robust, and secure group communication protocols for wireless mesh networks. In particular, we will

• Build a wireless mesh test-bed for experiments and protocol validation
• Develop distributed protocols for efficient group communication (multicast, broadcast) in wireless mesh networks
• Investigate and develop efficient and robust group key management protocol in wireless mesh networks
• Study the viability and limitations of cross-layer design as a new paradigm of building secure network services

Publications

Mitigating Attacks against Virtual Coordinate System Based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks. J. Dong, E. Ackermann, B. Bhavar, and C. Nita-Rotaru. To appear in Transactions in Sensor Networks, accepted Sept. 2009.

Secure Network Coding for Wireless Mesh Networks: Threats, Challenges, and Directions. J. Dong, R. Curtmola, and C. Nita-Rotaru. In Computer Communications (Elsevier), Nov 2009. [PDF][BIBTEX]

Secure Group Communication in Wireless Mesh Networks J. Dong, K. E. Ackermann and C. Nita-Rotaru. In Ad Hoc Networks (Elsevier) Journal, Special Issue: Privacy and Security in Wireless Sensor and Ad Hoc Networks, Nov 2009 [PDF][BIBTEX]

Detection, Diagnosis, and Isolation of Control and Data Attacks in Sensor Networks. I. Khalil, S. Bagchi, C. Nita-Rotaru, and N. B Schroff. In Ad Hoc Networks Journal (Elsevier), June 2009. [BIBTEX]

BSMR: Byzantine-Resilient Secure Multicast Routing in Multi-hop Wireless Networks. R. Curtmola and C. Nita-Rotaru. In IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), vol. 8, no. 4, April 2009. [PDF][BIBTEX]

Practical Defenses Against Pollution Attacks in Intra-Flow Network Coding for Wireless Mesh Networks J. Dong, R. Curtmola and C. Nita-Rotaru. In the Second ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec), Zurich, Switzerland, March 2009. [PDF][Extended Version][BIBTEX]

Toward Secure Network Coding in Wireless Networks: Threats and Challenges J. Dong, R. Curtmola, R. Sethi and C. Nita-Rotaru. In Proceedings of 4th Workshop on Secure Network Protocols (NPSEC) in conjunction with IEEE ICNP, Orlando, Florida, Oct 2008. [PDF][BIBTEX][Slides]

On the Pitfalls of Using High-Throughput Metrics in Adversarial Wireless Mesh Networks, J. Dong, R. Curtmola and C. Nita-Rotaru. In the Fifth Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON 2008), San Francisco CA, June 2008. [PDF][Extended Version][BIBTEX][Slides]

Secure Group Communication in Wireless Mesh Networks. In Ninth IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WOWMOM), Newport Beach, CA, June, 2008. J. Dong, K. Ackermann, and C Nita-Rotaru. [PDF][BIBTEX][Slides]

Mitigating Attacks against Virtual Coordinate System Based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks. J. Dong, B. Bhavar, E. Ackermann and C. Nita-Rotaru. In First ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec), Alexandria, VA, March 2008. [PDF][BIBTEX][Slides]

BSMR: Byzantine-Resilient Secure Multicast Routing in Multi-hop Wireless Networks. R. Curtmola and C. Nita-Rotaru. In SECON 2007, June 2007, San Diego, CA. [ PDF ]

ODSBR: An On-Demand Secure Byzantine Resilient Routing Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks. B. Awerbuch, R. Curtmola, D. Holmer, C. Nita-Rotaru and H. Rubens. In ACM Transactions on Information Systems Security (TISSEC), November 2007. [PDF].

Presentations

Practical Defenses Against Pollution Attacks in Intra-Flow Network Coding for Wireless Mesh Networks WiSec, Zurich, Switzerland, Mar. 2009, Presented by J. Dong.

Toward Secure Network Coding in Wireless Networks: Threats and Challenges NPSec, Orlando, FL, Oct 2008, Presented by J. Dong.

The Quest for Perfromance in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks: Threats and Defenses. Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago IL, Sept. 2008, Presented by C. Nita-Rotaru.

Secure Group Communication in Wireless Mesh Networks. WOWMOM, Newport Beach CA, June 2008, Presented by J. Dong.

On the Pitfalls of Using High-Throughput Metrics in Adversarial Wireless Mesh Networks. IEEE SECON 2008, San Francisco CA, June 2008. Presented by J. Dong.

Mitigating Attacks against Virtual Coordinate System Based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks. ACM WISEC, Alexandria VA, March 2008.Presented by J. Dong.

On the Pitfalls of Blind Acceptance of Metrics in Adversarial Networks. University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, Feb. 2008. Presented by C. Nita-Rotaru.

On the Pitfalls of Blind Acceptance of Metrics in Adversarial Networks. EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, Feb. 2008. Presented by C. Nita-Rotaru.

On the Pitfalls of Blind Acceptance of Metrics in Adversarial Networks. TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany, Feb. 2008. Presented by C. Nita-Rotaru.

BSMR: Byzantine-Resilient Secure Multicast Routing in Multi-hop Wireless Networks. In IEEE SECON 2007, San Diego CA, June 2007. Presented by R. Curtmola.

Enabling Collaborative Applications in Wireless Mesh Networks. Motorola Labs, Chicago, IL, July 2007. Presented by C. Nita-Rotaru.

Building Trustworthy Mesh Networks. Presented at Microsoft Research, Mesh Networking Group, February 2006. Presented by C. Nita-Rotaru.

Students

Current Members

• Jing Dong, Graduate Student
• Vivek Vijaykumar, Graduate Student

Previous Members

• Reza Curtmola, Postdoctoral Research Associate
• David Zage Graduate Student
• Kurt Ackermann, Undergraduate Student
• Brett Bavar, Undergraduate Student
• David Inman, Undergraduate Student
• Ruben Sethi, Undergraduate Student

Software

• Byzantine attacks module for NS2 : This module provides the capability to simulate the black hole, Byzantine wormhole, and Byzantine overlay network wormhole attacks without modifying the routing protocol.
• Simulation code for virtual coordinate system attacks and defense for BVR. The code implemented coordinate deflation, inflation, oscillation, and hash chain replay attacks, as well as hash chain replay defense and oscillation defense techniques. This code is implemented as part of the tinyos-1.x distribution.
• Simulation code for attacks and defense on high-throughput multicast protocols for Glomosim. The code integrates high-throughput multicast metrics with ODMRP as described in [1], and implements various metric manipulation based attacks and the defense techniques. The code requires glomosim-2.03.

Related Courses

• Wireless Network Security (CS 590W) - Fall 2006.
• Distributed Systems (CS 603) - Spring 2006.
• Insider Threats to Information Systems (CS 590T) - Fall 2004.
• Cryptography (CS 555) - graduate course - Spring 2005.
• Cryptography - undergraduate course (CS 355) - Spring 2007.
• Security Topics in Networking and Distributed Systems (CS 590D) - Spring 2004.

Resources

Wireless Test-beds

• Microsoft Mesh Networking -- http://research.microsoft.com/mesh
• Mesh@Purdue -- https://engineering.purdue.edu/MESH
• JHU SMesh -- http://www.smesh.org
• MIT Roofnet -- http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/roofnet/doku.php
• MIT Grid Project -- http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/grid/testbed.html
• UCSB MeshNet -- http://moment.cs.ucsb.edu/meshnet/
• Orbit Lab -- http://www.orbit-lab.org
• Carleton mesh -- http://kunz-pc.sce.carleton.ca/MESH/index.htm
• MINT at SUNY SB -- http://www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu/mint/

Funding

This project is funded by the NSF CyberTrust Program, Career: Scalable, Robust and Secure Group-Oriented Services for Wireless Mesh Networks. Principal Investigator: Cristina Nita-Rotaru (Purdue University).