Security and Collaboration Protocols for Mobile and Sensor Networks.

Abstract

Research in network and computer system architecture is evolving beyond its traditional focus as mobile devices become ubiquitous and mobile computing triggers dramatic change in the computing world. Mobile devices can form heterogeneous mobile networks that provide distributed services and information access in real time from anywhere in the world. Coincident with this change, the assurance of network and system security and availability becomes an important problem. This problem is challenging because it requires the system to be easy to manage and operate, but also requires reliability and security. For the purpose of securing a network, we usually require authentication, authorization, and accounting. Authentication requires users to prove their identity. Accounting requires intrusion detection or forensic analysis to find attacks, if any, in the system. Finally, authorization requires access control to ensure data privacy.

This dissertation aims to design security and collaboration protocols to create a comprehensive trust framework to protect mobile and sensor networks by applying cryptographic algorithms. It makes three primary contributions. First, we propose and implement a distributed authentication protocol called DAPP in wireless sensor networks to allow sensors to authenticate servers without requiring a commonly-used trusted authentication server. DAPP maintains the distributed nature of sensor networks, has low computation and communication overhead, and is resilient to node compromises. Second, to attain security for nodes in mobile ad hoc networks, we present an intrusion detection system (IDS) architecture at the application layer to help detect malicious nodes in the network. We describe the design of this architecture and the use of mobile agents to augment each node's IDS. Finally, we design a trusted group-based information sharing protocol called TGIS for mobile devices to establish a trust relationship with collaborators and enforce data access control between collaborators with different privileges. TGIS is built upon existing trust infrastructures in individual organizations to enable trust management for group collaboration.

The security and collaboration protocols presented in this dissertation together achieve secure distributed authentication, authorization, and accounting in mobile and sensor networks.