NETWORKING 2015/14

IEEE 2015: AUTHENTICATED KEY EXCHANGE PROTOCOLS FOR PARALLEL NETWORK FILE SYSTEMS

ABSTRACT:            We study the problem of key establishment for secure many-to-many communications. The problem is inspired by the proliferation of large-scale distributed file systems supporting parallel access to multiple storage devices. Our work focuses on the current Internet standard for such file systems, i.e., parallel Network File System (pNFS), which makes use of Kerberos to establish parallel session keys between clients and storage devices. Our review of the existing Kerberos-based protocol shows that it has a number of limitations: (i) a metadata server facilitating key exchange between the clients and the storage devices has heavy workload that restricts the scalability of the protocol; (ii) the protocol does not provide forward secrecy; (iii) the metadata server generates itself all the session keys that are used between the clients and storage devices, and this inherently leads to key escrow. In this paper, we propose a variety of authenticated key exchange protocols that are designed to address the above issues. We show that our protocols are capable of reducing up to approximately 54% of the workload of the metadata server and concurrently supporting forward secrecy and escrow-freeness. All this requires only a small fraction of increased computation overhead at the client.

IEEE 2015: BRACER: A DISTRIBUTED BROADCAST PROTOCOL IN MULTI-HOP COGNITIVE RADIO AD HOC NETWORKS WITH COLLISION AVOIDANCE

ABSTRACT: Broadcast is an important operation in wireless ad hoc networks where control information is usually propagated as broadcasts for the realization of most networking protocols. In traditional ad hoc networks, since the spectrum availability is uniform, broadcasts are delivered via a common channel which can be heard by all users in a network. However, in cognitive radio (CR) ad hoc networks, different unlicensed users may acquire different available channel sets. This non-uniform spectrum availability imposes special design challenges for broadcasting in CR ad hoc networks. In this paper, a fully-distributed Broadcast protocol in multi-hop Cognitive Radio ad hoc networks with collision avoidance, BRACER, is proposed. In our design, we consider practical scenarios that each unlicensed user is not assumed to be aware of the global network topology, the spectrum availability information of other users, and time synchronization information. By intelligently downsizing the original available channel set and designing the broadcasting sequences and scheduling schemes, our proposed broadcast protocol can provide very high successful broadcast ratio while achieving very short average broadcast delay. It can also avoid broadcast collisions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the unique broadcasting challenges in multi-hop CR ad hoc networks with collision avoidance.

IEEE 2015: COLLISION TOLERANT AND COLLISION FREE PACKET SCHEDULING FOR UNDERWATER ACOUSTIC LOCALIZATION

ABSTRACT This article considers the joint problem of packet scheduling and self-localization in an underwater acoustic sensor network with randomly distributed nodes. In terms of packet scheduling, our goal is to minimize the localization time, and to do so we consider two packet transmission schemes, namely a collision-free scheme (CFS), and a collision-tolerant scheme (CTS). The required localization time is formulated for these

schemes, and through analytical results and numerical examples their performances are shown to be dependent on the circumstances. When the packet duration is short (as is the case for a localization packet), the operating area is large (above 3 km in at least one dimension), and the average probability of packet-loss is not close to zero, the collision-tolerant scheme is found to require a shorter localization time. At the same time, its implementation complexity is lower than that of the collision-free scheme, because in CTS, the anchors work independently. CTS consumes slightly more energy to make up for packet collisions, but it is shown to provide a better localization accuracy. An iterative Gauss-Newton algorithm is employed by each sensor node for self-localization, and the Cramér Rao lower bound is evaluated as a benchmark.

IEEE 2015: DATA COLLECTION IN MULTI-APPLICATION SHARING WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

ABSTRACT: Data sharing for data collection among multiple applications is an efficient way to reduce communication cost for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This paper is the first work to introduce the interval data sharing problem which is to investigate how

to transmit as less data as possible over the network, and meanwhile the transmitted data satisfies the requirements of all the applications. Different from current studies where each application requires a single data sampling during each task, we study the problem where each application requires a continuous interval of data sampling in each task. The proposed problem is a nonlinear non convex optimization problem. In order to lower the high complexity for solving a nonlinear non convex optimization problem in resource restricted WSNs, a 2-factor approximation algorithm whose time complexity is Oðn2Þ and memory complexity is OðnÞ is provided. A special instance of this problem is also   analyzed. This special instance can be solved with a dynamic programming algorithm in polynomial time, which gives an optimal result in Oðn2Þ time complexity and OðnÞ memory complexity. Three online algorithms are provided to process the continually coming tasks. Both the theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

IEEE 2015: DEFEATING JAMMING WITH THE POWER OF SILENCE: A GAME-THEORETIC ANALYSIS

ABSTRACT: The timing channel is a logical communication channel in which information is encoded in the timing between events. Recently, the use of the timing channel has been proposed as a countermeasure to reactive jamming attacks performed by an energy- constrained malicious node. In fact, while a jammer is able to disrupt the information contained in the attacked packets, timing information cannot be jammed, and therefore, timing channels can be exploited to deliver information to the receiver even on a jammed channel. Since the nodes under attack and the jammer have conflicting interests, their interactions can be modeled by means of game theory. Accordingly, in this paper, a game-theoretic model of the interactions between nodes exploiting the timing

channel to achieve resilience to jamming attacks and a jammer is derived and analyzed. More specifically, the Nash equilibrium is studied in terms of existence, uniqueness, and convergence under best response dynamics. Furthermore, the case in which the communication nodes set their strategy and the jammer reacts accordingly is modeled and analyzed as a Stackelberg game, by considering both perfect and imperfect knowledge of the jammer’s utility function. Extensive numerical results are presented, showing the impact of network parameters on the system performance. 

IEEE 2015: EFFECTIVE KEY MANAGEMENT IN DYNAMIC WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

ABSTRACT: Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been deployed for a wide variety of applications, including military sensing and tracking, patient status monitoring, traffic flow monitoring, where sensory devices often move between different locations. Securing data and communications requires suitable encryption key protocols. In this paper, we propose a certificateless-effective key management (CL-EKM) protocol for secure communication in dynamic WSNs characterized by node mobility. The CL-EKM supports efficient key updates when a node leaves or joins a cluster and ensures forward and backward key secrecy. The protocol also supports efficient key revocation

for compromised nodes and minimizes the impact of a node compromise on the security of other communication links. A security analysis of our scheme shows that our protocol is effective in defending against various attacks.We implement CL-EKM in Contiki OS and simulate it using Cooja simulator to assess its time, energy, communication, and memory performance.

IEEE 2015: REAL-TIME PATH PLANNING BASED ON HYBRID-VANET-ENHANCED TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM

ABSTRACT: Real-time path planning can efficiently relieve traffic congestion in urban scenarios. However, how to design an efficient path-planning algorithm to achieve a globally optimal vehicletraffic control still remains a challenging problem, particularly when we take drivers’ individual preferences into consideration. In this paper, we first establish a hybrid intelligent transportation system (ITS), i.e., a hybrid-VANET-enhanced ITS, which utilizes both vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and cellular systems of the public transportation system to enable real-time communications among vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), and a vehicle-traffic server in an efficient way. Then, we propose  

real-time path-planning algorithm, which not only improves the overall spatial utilization of a road network but reduces average vehicle travel cost for avoiding vehicles from  getting stuck in congestion as well. A stochastic Lyapunov optimization technique is exploited to address the globally optimal path-planning problem. Finally, the transmission delay of the hybrid-VANET-enhanced ITS is evaluated in VISSIM to show the timeliness of the proposed communication framework. Moreover, system-level simulations conducted in Java demonstrate that the proposed path-planning algorithm outperforms the traditional distributed path planning in terms of balancing the spatial utilization and drivers’ travel cost.

IEEE 2015: DATA COLLECTION IN MULTI-APPLICATION SHARING WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

ABSTRACT: Data sharing for data collection among multiple applications is an efficient way to reduce communication cost for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This paper is the first work to introduce the interval data sharing problem which is to investigate how to transmit as less data as possible over the network, and meanwhile the transmitted data satisfies the requirements of all the applications. Different from current studies where each application requires a single data sampling during each task, we study the problem where each application requires a continuous interval of data sampling in each task. The

proposed problem is a nonlinear nonconvex optimization problem. In order to lower the high complexity for solving a nonlinear nonconvex optimization problem in resource restricted WSNs, a 2-factor approximation algorithm whose time complexity is O(n2)

and memory complexity is O(n) is provided. A special instance of this problem is also analyzed. This special instance can be solved with a dynamic programming algorithm in polynomial time, which gives an optimal result in O(n2) time complexity and O(n) memory complexity. Three online algorithms are provided to process the continually coming tasks. Both the theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

IEEE 2015: LIGHTWEIGHT SECURE SCHEME FOR DETECTING PROVENANCE FORGERY AND PACKET DROP ATTACKS IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

ABSTRACT:Large-scale sensor networks are deployed in numerous application domains, and the data they collect are used in decision-making for critical infrastructures. Data are streamed from multiple sources through intermediate processing nodes that aggregate information. A malicious adversary may introduce additional nodes in the network or compromise existing ones. Therefore, assuring high data trustworthiness is crucial for correct decision-making. Data provenance represents a key factor in evaluating the trustworthiness of sensor data. Provenance management for sensor networks introduces several challenging requirements, such as low energy and bandwidth consumption, efficient storage and secure transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight scheme to securely transmit provenance for sensor data. The proposed technique relies on inpacket Bloom filters to encode provenance. We introduce efficient mechanisms for provenance verification and reconstruction at the base station. In addition, we extend the secure provenance scheme with functionality to detect packet drop attacks staged by malicious data forwarding nodes. We evaluate the proposed technique both analytically and empirically, and the results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the lightweight secure provenance scheme in detecting packet forgery and loss attacks..