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9 December, 2005 -- Attack-Resistant Location Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks, A Talk by Dr. Peng Ning

Recent technological advances have made it possible to develop distributed sensor networks consisting of a large number of low-cost, low-power, and multi-functional sensor nodes that communicate in short distances through wireless links. Such sensor networks are ideal candidates for a wide range of applications such as monitoring of critical infrastructures and military operations. Many sensor network applications require sensors' locations to function correctly. Due to the cost reason and other operational constraints, it is usually necessary to provide a location discovery service to facilitate sensor nodes to determine their locations. Location discovery in sensor networks is vulnerable to malicious attacks in hostile environments. The security of location discovery can certainly be enhanced by authentication. However, the possible node compromises and the fact that location determination uses certain physical features (e.g., received signal strength) of radio signals make authentication not as effective as in traditional security applications. This talk will present two methods to tolerate malicious attacks against range-based location discovery in sensor networks. The first method filters out malicious beacon signals on the basis of the ``consistency'' among multiple beacon signals, while the second method tolerates malicious beacon signals by adopting an iteratively refined voting scheme. Both methods can survive malicious attacks even if the attacks bypass authentication, provided that the benign beacon signals constitute the majority of the beacon signals. This talk will also describe the implementation of these techniques on MICA2 motes running TinyOS, and the evaluation through both simulation and field experiments.

The Talk will be held at 11:00 a.m. in CSIC Building 1115.