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Publication date: 1 de June, 2021Services for Intrusion Tolerant AdHoc and Sensor Networks
SITAN will develop security services for wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks, simplifying the design of dependable applications in pervasive, secure, intrusion-tolerant and reliable monitoring and actuation settings.
Wireless mobile ad hoc environments are expected to involve the deployment dynamic applications for various scenarios, such as: unmanned terrestrial or aerial vehicles that need to cooperate to perform some maneuver; impromptu group meetings or interactive gaming supported by peer-to-peer information sharing and storage; and distributed sensing where individuals occasionally collaborate by providing collected information to get better view of the overall environment. This new reality leads to a need for tools well adapted to the ad hoc environment, which can support the implementation of applications by offering a rich set of services.
However, the design of these tools is not easy to accomplish due to several factors, among them:
– The ad-hoc nature of many communications creates an environment where connections might be created and destroyed at a rapid pace, whenever the devices owners find it appropriate or as nodes move outside the communication range of other devices, increasing the complexity of the identification of currently participating nodes;
– Environmental phenomena such as electromagnetic interference, fading, and collisions and also node mobility can cause momentarily loss of connection, making dependable execution a challenge; in particular, these events can result in message loss or corruption, but should not be sufficient to permanently assume a node or link as faulty, specially because they can possibly affect many nodes during the lifetime of a system;
– The openness of the environment facilitates the execution of malicious attacks, and therefore, in many cases it is realistic to assume that the network is under constant attack; in this scenario, it is very reasonable to consider that at any given time there will be individual nodes that are the victims of successful attacks (or intruded), requiring specific measures to ensure overall correct and secure operation.
To address these issues, the project will create a toolbox of distributed services that can be employed in the construction of wireless ad hoc applications, simplifying their design and development, and automatically assuring tolerance to both accidental faults and attacks.
To fulfill this objective, it will be necessary to investigate new distributed protocols and models, which are able to capture the inherent characteristics of the environment, and explore them to enhance the performance and resilience of the system. For example, the wireless networks provide a natural broadcasting medium, where the cost of transmitting a message to multiple nodes can be just the same of sending it to a single node, as long as they are within communication range. To take advantage of this feature, it becomes necessary to depart from the common modeling assumption employed in intrusion-tolerant systems, where channels are
reliable and point-to-point, and assume broadcast communication with dynamic omissions failures. Unfortunately, these new modeling assumptions are bound by strict impossibility results which prevent basic distributed primitives such as weak forms of consensus, and therefore, we will need to find ways to circumvent them to make our solutions practical.
The project will make contributions in the following important areas:
– First, the project will investigate new models and protocols well adapted to mobile wireless ad hoc networks, which will support the design of a toolbox of intrusion-tolerant services. These services will be offered in a flexible manner, allowing the applications to choose the most appropriate operations that fit their needs. They will cover a number of fundamental coordination operations, namely agreement among distinct nodes and data dissemination with distinct guarantees. These services will then be extended to support more sophisticated distributed tasks, such as determining the current group of participants or providing a privacy assuring storage.
– Second, the project will implement the developed protocols in a coherent toolbox, where low level protocols support the construction of higher level services. This implementation will be highly adaptable and efficient, since we would like to support applications running in diverse settings. Therefore, we intend to experiment the toolbox in both portable devices, and in a more extreme scenario, like a sensor network where nodes are characterized by being much more resource constrained in terms of computational, communication,
and power capabilities.
– Third, the project will validate the services using a set of scenarios and state of the art evaluations. We intend to perform both an experimental and a simulation-based evaluation. In order to do the simulations, we will most probably have to extend available simulators with a few modules that reflect the fundamental characteristics of the ad hoc networks being targeted.
Sname | SITAN |
---|---|
Funding Total | 177,319.00 |
Funding Center | 65,608.00 |
State | Concluded |
Startdate | 01/05/2011 |
Enddate | 30/04/2014 |