TRUST Security Seminar: Coping with Malice in Wireless and Vehicular Networks

As networking becomes increasingly prevalent, malicious network behavior can no longer be ignored. In this talk, I will describe my work on dealing with malicious behavior in three different areas: wireless broadcast, medium access control in wireless networks, and malicious messages in vehicular safety networks. Broadcast jamming is a challenging problem because using traditional spread spectrum technology, a receiver has enough information to jam a transmission. I will first present a scheme that mitigates broadcast jamming through asymmetric knowledge, wherein a sender has more information than any subset of receivers. Medium access control suffers from a similar problem: information that allows a potentially conflicting sender to avoid a transmitter also allows an attacker to jam that transmission. I will present an approach that denies jammers the information they need to jam while still providing interference avoidance from legitimate receivers. Finally, I will discuss how the need to cope with malice, and thus the need for some form of revocation, affects design decisions in vehicular safety networks.

Speaker: Yih-Chun Hu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Wozniak Lounge