Donggang Liu

Establishing pairwise keys in distributed sensor networks

Pairwise key establishment is a fundamental security service in sensor networks; it enables sensor nodes to communicate securely with each other using cryptographic techniques. However, due to the resource constraints on sensors, it is infeasible to use traditional key management techniques such as public key cryptography and key distribution center (KDC). To facilitate the study of novel pairwise key predistribution techniques, this paper presents a general framework for establishing pairwise keys between sensors on the basis of a polynomial-based key predistribution protocol [2]. This paper then presents two efficient instantiations of the general framework: a random subset assignment key predistribution scheme and a grid-based key predistribution scheme. The analysis in this paper indicates that these two schemes have a number of nice properties, including high probability (or guarantee) to establish pairwise keys, tolerance of node captures, and low communication overhead. Finally, this paper presents a technique to reduce the computation at sensors required by these schemes.

Multilevel μTESLA: Broadcast authentication for distributed sensor networks

Broadcast authentication is a fundamental security service in distributed sensor networks. This paper presents the development of a scalable broadcast authentication scheme named <i>multilevel μTESLA</i> based on μTESLA, a broadcast authentication protocol whose scalability is limited by its unicast-based initial parameter distribution. Multilevel μTESLA satisfies several nice properties, including low overhead, tolerance of message loss, scalability to large networks, and resistance to replay attacks as well as denial-of-service attacks. This paper also presents the experimental results obtained through simulation, which demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme under severe denial-of-service attacks and poor channel quality.

Location Privacy in Sensor Networks Against a Global Eavesdropper

While many protocols for sensor network security provide confidentiality for the content of messages, contextual information usually remains exposed. Such information can be critical to the mission of the sensor network, such as the location of a target object in a monitoring application, and it is often important to protect this information as well as message content. There have been several recent studies on providing location privacy in sensor networks. However, these existing approaches assume a weak adversary model where the adversary sees only local network traffic. We first argue that a strong adversary model, the global eavesdropper, is often realistic in practice and can defeat existing techniques. We then formalize the location privacy issues under this strong adversary model and show how much communication overhead is needed for achieving a given level of privacy. We also propose two techniques that prevent the leakage of location information: periodic collection and source simulation. Periodic collection provides a high level of location privacy, while source simulation provides trade-offs between privacy, communication cost, and latency. Through analysis and simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed techniques are efficient and effective in protecting location information from the attacker.

Efficient self-healing group key distribution with revocation capability

This paper presents group key distribution techniques for large and dynamic groups over unreliable channels. The techniques proposed here are based on the self-healing key distribution methods (with revocation capability) recently developed by Staddon et al. [27]. By introducing a novel personal key distribution technique, this paper reduces (1) the communication overhead of personal key share distribution from O(t2log q) to O(tlogq), (2) the communication overhead of self-healing key distribution with t-revocation capability from O((mt2+tm)log q) to O(mtlog q), and (3) the storage overhead of the self-healing key distribution with

Practical broadcast authentication in sensor networks

t

Protecting Location Privacy in Sensor Networks against a Global Eavesdropper

-revocation capability at each group member from O(m2log q) to O(mlogq), where

Distributed detection of replica node attacks with group deployment knowledge in wireless sensor networks

t

Source location privacy against laptop-class attacks in sensor networks

is the maximum number of colluding group members,

Pre-authentication filters: providing dos resistance for signature-based broadcast authentication in sensor networks

m

Resilient Cluster Formation for Sensor Networks

is the number of sessions, and