CENS Technical Seminar Series

Mitigation of Control and Data Traffic Attacks in Wireless Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networks

Invited Speaker: Prof. Saurabh Bagchi, ECE, Purdue University
Date: September 28, 2007
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: 4760 Boelter Hall, UCLA

Abstract

Recently we have seen increasing adoption of wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks (WAHAS) for security critical applications in military and civilian domains. However, they are often exposed to a wide-range of control and data traffic attacks. Control attacks are directed to control traffic in the network, such as routing and localization. Examples are wormhole, Sybil, and rushing attacks. Control attacks are often relatively easy to launch since they do not need the malicious node to possess any cryptographic key. They are also damaging since they can be used to subvert the functionality of the network by disrupting data flow. Data traffic attacks include selective forwarding and misrouting attacks.

We have pursued the twin goals of detection and isolation of malicious behavior to secure WAHAS networks. The basic primitive used for detection is local monitoring whereby each node oversees the traffic in its one-hop neighborhood and maintains state for the behavior of each neighbor. We develop a suite of three protocols for distributed collaborative detection of misbehavior in static networks, mobile networks, and energy efficient sleep-awake equipped networks. Crosscutting the detection strategy is the strategy for collaboratively isolating the malicious node. I will present the specific results from the investigation and also the lessons learnt from this line of enquiry.

Biography

Dr. Saurabh Bagchi is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Purdue University since August 2002. Before that, he did his Ph.D. from the Computer Science department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interest is in distributed fault tolerant systems.

He is a faculty fellow of the Cyber Center at Purdue and is supported by a Lilly Endowment grant for research excellence. His work is supported by NSF, Indiana 21st Century Foundation, Motorola, Avaya, and Purdue Research Foundation. He has been a Program Committee member for the Intl. Symposium on Dependable Systems and Networks Conference (DSN) (2003-current), the Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS) (2004-current). His papers have been the runner-up for the best paper at the High Performance Distributed Computing Conference (HPDC 2006), IEEE Intl. Microwave Symposium (IMS 2005), and IEEE Intl. Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2005).