Sensor networks are ideal candidates for a wide range of applications such as health monitoring and military operations. Sensors' locations play a critical role in numerous sensor network applications. There have been substantial advances in location discovery for sensor networks in the past. However, location discovery in hostile environments has been mostly overlooked. Due to the lack of solutions to prevent, detect, or survive malicious attacks, all of the existing location discovery protocols become vulnerable in hostile environments.
The objective of this project is to develop a comprehensive suite of techniques to prevent, detect, or survive malicious attacks against location discovery in sensor networks. The investigators are studying key management schemes suitable for authenticating beacon messages, exploring techniques to make existing location discovery schemes more resilient, seeking beaconless location discovery that uses deployment knowledge instead of beacon nodes, and finally investigating methods to integrate the proposed techniques so that they can be combined cost-effectively for sensor network applications. This project will have significant impact on the sensor network research by providing specific technical solutions that can be integrated with the sensor network techniques currently being developed, so that sensor network applications are developed with inherent, built-in security.
