Speaker: Yi Yang
Title: Towards Compromise Resilient Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks provide powerful and economical solutions for
many military and civilian applications. However, wireless sensor
networks are also targets of many security attacks due to their
extremely scarce resources and their unattended, hostile operating
environment. Among all the potential attacks, insider attacks launched
by compromised sensors are very challenging and difficult to be
addressed, because compromised sensors have valid credentials so that
they can take part in the normal network operations and provide
correct responses once challenged. The objective of my research is to
reduce or even eliminate the possible damages caused by compromised
sensors.

In this talk, I will focus on two important security issues. First, I
will present SDAP, a Secure hop-by-hop Data Aggregation Protocol for
sensor networks. Data aggregation is a very important technique to
reduce data redundancy and communication overhead during sensor data
collection. SDAP can preserve the efficiency of the ordinary
hierarchical hop-by-hop data aggregation and meanwhile provide high
assurance on the trustworthiness of the final aggregation result, even
though multiple compromised sensors may collude to trick the base
station to accept bogus aggregation data. Second, I will introduce a
very (if not the most) severe attack from compromised sensors, which
is called sensor worm attack. We not only validate the possibility for
worm attacks to happen in sensor networks, but also propose an
effective defensive scheme based on novel graph coloring and software
diversity techniques.