New Adversary and New Threats: Security in Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

by Di Ma

University of California, Irvine

Date

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Time

3:00 p.m. — 4:00 p.m.

Place

Lindley Hall 101 (note special place)

Abstract:  Some Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) preclude constant presence of a centralized data collection point, i.e., a sink. In such a disconnected or unattended setting, nodes must accumulate sensed data until it can be off-loaded to an itinerant sink. Furthermore, if the operating environment is hostile, there is a very real danger of node and data compromise. The unattended nature of the network makes it an attractive target for attacks that aim to learn, erase or modify potentially valuable data collected and held by sensors. We argue that adversarial models and defense techniques in prior WSN security literature are unsuitable for the unattended WSN (UWSN) setting. We define a new adversarial model by taking into account special features of the UWSN environment. We show that, in the presence of a powerful mobile adversary, securing data stored on unattended sensors presents some interesting challenges and opens up an exciting new line of research.  In this talk, we focus on techniques that allow unattended sensors to recover from intrusions by soliciting help from peer sensors. We show how certain simple defense methods can result in sensors re-gaining secrecy of collected data, despite adversary's efforts to the contrary. We present an extensive analysis and a set of simulation results that support our observations and demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed techniques.

Biography:  Di Ma is a Ph.D. candidate of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. She received a B.Eng. degree from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China and a M.Eng. degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She was with the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore (2000-2005). Her research interests include computer and network security, data and storage security, and applied cryptography.

Colloquium Provided By:

the School of Informatics