Securing Wireless Sensor Networks

David Evans

Communications, Controls, and Signal Processing Seminar
Univeristy of Virginia, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
8 December 2003

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are often proposed for hostile environments where intruders can eavesdrop on transmissions, insert rogue transmissions, destroy nodes and capture their key material. The limited computation and energy resources in sensor nodes make many traditional cryptographic approaches impractical, but the embedding of nodes in physical environment offers opportunities for new approaches. This talk will assume no previous background in cryptography, and will introduce cryptographic primitives useful for securing sensor networks. It will summarize our group's recent work in secure aggregation, key distribution and neighbor recognition in the presence of wormhole attacks.

Slides: PPT

Links to cited papers:

Using Directional Antennas to Prevent Wormhole Attacks
Lingxuan Hu and David Evans, Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, San Diego, 5-6 February 2004. (PDF, 11 pages)
Secure Aggregation for Wireless Networks.
Lingxuan Hu and David Evans. Workshop on Security and Assurance in Ad hoc Networks. January, 2003. (PDF, PS, 8 pages)

Cryptography Courses:

CS588: Cryptology - Principles and Applications (Fall 2001)
Cryptography Applications Bistro (Spring 2004 Seminar)

Research Project Pages:

http://swarm.cs.virginia.edu — Swarm Computing
http://www.splint.org — Secure Programming Lint