[Colloq] Bishal Thapa - Ph.D. Proposal Friday, April 16

[Rachel Kalweit]

Bishal Thapa will present his Thesis Proposal on
Date: Friday, April 16th, 2010
Time: 10:15AM
Location: 366 West Village H

Title: Robust Wireless Communication in Adversarial Setting

Abstract:
Robust wireless communication is critical to the functioning of not only the military systems, but also the civilian and commercial systems. In this thesis, we propose to explore the security of wireless networks in the presence of adversaries trying to prevent the communication. There is an inherent vulnerability in wireless network due to the broadcast medium that is shared between communicating nodes and is also exposed to adversaries. Furthermore, the demand for wireless technology of increasing sophistication and ubiquity, along with the availability of low-cost fully controllable software defined radios has led to highly efficient and readily deployable smart attacks. Our goal is to devise energy-and-computation efficient adversary-resilient mechanisms against such adversarial attacks.

First, we consider Spread Spectrum (SS) communication in the presence of jamming. SS requires a pre-shared secret, which becomes problematic when there are jammers present in the medium and the physical contact is impossible. We introduce a zero pre-shared secret key establishment protocol that is provably optimal in terms of energy with minimal computation and storage overhead compared to the traditional SS. Second, we study control channel jamming in wireless network by inside attackers (traitors). Resource-constrained networks employ control channels to share resources efficiently among users, which creates a bottleneck in the system since an adversary can effectively prevent the communication by simply jamming the control information. We propose efficient traitor-resilient mechanisms to deliver the control information in the presence of traitors. Finally, we consider an IEEE 802.11 unicast network in the presence of an adversary. We study the interaction between optimal cross-layer attack strategies of the adversary and communication strategies of the links in terms of rate and power control using game theoretic framework. We evaluate the proposed solutions with analysis, simulation and real-world experiments using system prototype.

Committee:
Dr. Guevara Noubir, NEU (Advisor)
Dr. Agnes Chan, NEU
Dr. Rajmohan Rajaraman, NEU
Dr. Radha Poovendran, Univ. of Washington (Ext. Committee Member)