6546013
Detecting Malicious Beacon Nodes for Secure Location Discovery in Wireless Sensor Networks
Sensors' locations play a critical role in many sensor network applications. A number of techniques have been proposed recently to discover the locations of regular sensors based on a few special nodes called beacon nodes, which are assumed to know their locations (e.g., through GPS receivers or manual configuration). However, none of these techniques can work properly when there are malicious attacks, especially when some of the beacon nodes are compromised. This paper introduces a suite of techniques to detect and remove compromised beacon nodes that supply misleading location information to the regular sensors, aiming at providing secure location discovery services in wireless sensor networks. These techniques start with a simple but effective method to detect malicious beacon signals. To identify malicious beacon nodes and avoid false detection, this paper also presents several techniques to detect replayed beacon signals. This paper then proposes a method to reason about the suspiciousness of each beacon node at the base station based on the detection results collected from beacon nodes, and then revoke malicious beacon nodes accordingly. Finally, this paper provides detailed analysis and simulation to evaluate the proposed techniques. The results show that our techniques are practical and effective in detecting malicious beacon nodes
5968490
Attack-resistant location estimation in sensor networks
Many sensor network applications require sensors' locations to function correctly. Despite the recent advances, location discovery for sensor networks in hostile environments has been mostly overlooked. Most of the existing localization protocols for sensor networks are vulnerable in hostile environments. The security of location discovery can certainly be enhanced by authentication. However, the possible node compromises and the fact that location determination uses certain physical features (e.g., received signal strength) of radio signals make authentication not as effective as in traditional security applications. This paper presents two methods to tolerate malicious attacks against beacon-based location discovery in sensor networks. The first method filters out malicious beacon signals on the basis of the "consistency" among multiple beacon signals, while the second method tolerates malicious beacon signals by adopting an it era lively refined voting scheme. Both methods can survive malicious attacks even if the attacks bypass authentication, provided that the benign beacon signals constitute the majority of the "consistent" beacon signals. This paper also presents the implementation of these techniques on MICA2 motes running TinyOS, and the evaluation through both simulation and field experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods are promising for the current generation of sensor networks.
53235721
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 sensor nodes, it is not feasible to use traditional key management techniques such as public key cryptography and key distribution center (KDC). A number of key predistribution techniques have been proposed for pairwise key establishment in sensor networks recently. To facilitate the study of novel pairwise key predistribution techniques, this paper develops a general framework for establishing pairwise keys between sensor nodes using bivariate polynomials. This paper then proposes two efficient instantiations of the general framework: a random subset assignment key predistribution scheme, and a hypercube-based key predistribution scheme. The analysis shows that both schemes have a number of nice properties, including high probability, or guarantee to establish pairwise keys, tolerance of node captures, and low storage, communication, and computation overhead. To further reduce the computation at sensor nodes, this paper presents an optimization technique for polynomial evaluation, which is used to compute pairwise keys. This paper also reports the implementation and the performance of the proposed schemes on MICA2 motes running TinyOS, an operating system for networked sensors. The results indicate that the proposed techniques can be applied efficiently in resource-constrained sensor networks.
8564766
Location-based pairwise key establishments for static sensor networks
Sensor networks are ideal candidates for applications such as target tracking and environment monitoring. Security in sensor networks is critical when there are potential adversaries. Establishment of pairwise keys is a fundamental security service, which forms the basis of other security services such as authentication and encryption. However, establishing pairwise keys in sensor networks is not a trivial task, particularly due to the resource constraints on sensors. This paper presents several techniques for establishing pairwise keys in static sensor networks. These techniques take advantage of the observation that in static sensor networks, although it is difficult to precisely pinpoint sensors' positions, it is often possible to approximately determine their locations. This paper presents a simple location-aware deployment model, and develops two pairwise key predistribution schemes, a closest pairwise keys predistribution scheme and a location-based pairwise keys scheme using bivariate polynomials, by taking advantage of sensors' expected locations. The analysis in this paper indicates that these schemes can achieve better performance if such location information is available and that the smaller the deployment error (i.e., the difference between a sensor's actual location and its expected location) is, the better performance they can achieve.
1535984
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.
769378
Efficient Distribution of Key Chain Commitments for Broadcast Authentication in Distributed Sensor Networks
Broadcast authentication is a fundamental security service in distributed sensor networks. A scheme named $\mu$TESLA has been proposed for efficient broadcast authentication in such networks. However, $\mu$TESLA requires initial distribution of certain information based on unicast between the base station and each sensor node before the actual authentication of broadcast messages. Due to the limited bandwidth in wireless sensor networks, this initial unicast-based distribution severely limits the application of $\mu$TESLA in large sensor networks. This paper presents a novel technique to replace the unicast-based initialization with a broadcast-based one. As a result, $\mu$TESLA can be used in a sensor network with a large amount of sensors, as long as the message from the base station can reach these sensor nodes. This paper further explores several techniques that improve the performance, the robustness, as well as the security of the proposed method. The resulting protocol satisfies several nice properties, including low overhead, tolerance of message loss, scalability to large networks, and resistance to replay attacks as well as some known Denial of Service (DOS) attacks.
6282895
Timing analysis including clock skew
Clock skew is an increasing concern for high-speed circuit designers. Circuit designers use transparent latches and skew-tolerant domino circuits to hide clock skew from the critical path and take advantage of shared portions of the clock network to budget less skew between nearby elements than across the entire die, but current timing analysis algorithms do not handle correlated clock skews. This paper extends the Sakallah-Mudge-Olukotun (SMO) latch-based timing analysis to include different amounts of clock skew between different elements. The key change is that departure times from each latch must be defined with respect to launching clocks so that the skew between the launching and receiving clocks can be determined at each receiver. The exact analysis leads to an explosion in the number of timing constraints, but most constraints are not tight in practical situations and a modified version of the Szymanski-Shenoy relaxation algorithm gives exact results with only a small increase in runtime. The timing analysis formulation also captures the effects of skew on edge-triggered flip-flops, domino circuits, and min-delay constraints. Our exact algorithm, applied to a supercomputer node controller with over 12000 clocked elements, finds the system can run 50-90 ps faster than a single skew analysis would predict and requires searching fewer than 4% more latch departures than conventional algorithms. With the less conservative skew budgets enabled by better timing analysis, we expect clocked systems will remain viable to multi-GHz frequencies.
12123652
Analysis of blocking dynamic circuits
In order for dynamic circuits to operate correctly, their inputs must be monotonically rising during evaluation. Blocking dynamic circuits satisfy this constraint by delaying evaluation until all inputs have been properly setup relative to the evaluation clock. By viewing dynamic gates as latches, we demonstrate that the optimal delay of a blocking dynamic gate may occur when the setup time is negative. With blocking dynamic circuits, cascading low-skew dynamic gates allows each dynamic gate to tolerate a degraded input level. The larger noise margin provides greater flexibility with the delay vs. noise margin trade-off (i.e. the circuit robustness vs. speed tradeoff). This paper generalizes blocking dynamic circuits and provides a systematic approach for assigning clock phases, given delay and noise margin constraints. Using this framework, one can analyze any logic network consisting of blocking dynamic circuits.
5450384
Gradient-based methods for simultaneous blind separation of mixed source signals
This paper presents gradient-based methods for simultaneous blind separation of arbitrarily mixed source signals. We consider the regular case where the mixing matrix has full column rank as well as ill-conditioned cases. Two cost functions based on fourth-order cumulants are introduced to simultaneously separate all separable single sources and all inseparable mixtures. By minimizing the cost functions, two gradient-based methods are developed. Our algorithms derived from gradient-based methods are guaranteed to converge. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of our methods.
17515399
Sizes of Graphs with Fixed Orders and Spans for Circular-Distance-Two Labelings
A k-circular-distance-two labeling (or k-c-labeling) of a simple graph G is a vertex-labeling, using the labels 0, 1, 2, · · · , k − 1, such that the “circular difference” (mod k) of the labels for adjacent vertices is at least two, and for vertices of distance-two apart is at least one. The σ-number, σ(G), of a graph G is the minimum k of a k-c-labeling of G. For any given positive integers n and k, let G(n, k) denote the set of graphs G on n vertices and σ(G) = k. We determine the maximum size (number of edges) and the minimum size of a graph G ∈ G(n, k). Furthermore, we prove that for any value p between the maximum and the minimum size, there exists a graph G ∈ G(n, k) of size p. These results are analogues of the ones by Georges and Mauro [4] on distance-two labelings.
14999533
Efficient target search with relevance feedback for large CBIR systems
Recent content-based image retrieval (CBIR) techniques were designed around query refinement based on relevance feedback. They suffer from slow convergence, high disk I/O, and do not even guarantee to find intended targets. In this paper, we identify the cause of these problems and propose several efficient target search methods to address these drawbacks. Our complexity analysis shows that our approach is able to reach any given target image with fewer iterations in the worst and average cases. We evaluated our techniques on large datasets in simulated and realistic environments. The results show that our approach significantly reduces the number of iterations and improves overall retrieval performance. The experiments also confirm that our approach can always retrieve intended targets even with poor selection of initial query points and can be used to improve the effectiveness of existing CBIR systems with relevance feedback.