Haowen Chan

Authenticated Communication and Computation in Known-Topology Networks with a Trusted Authority Degree Type: Ph.D. in Computer Science
Advisor(s): Adrian Perrig
Graduated: December 2009

Abstract:

We show that two distinguishing properties of sensor networks, i.e., the presence of a trusted base station, and the pre-knowledge of the fixed network topology, can yield security protocols that are both communication-efficient and highly general. We show new protocols for broadcast authentication, credential dissemination and node-to-node signatures. For securing in-network distributed computations, we show an algorithm for securely computing the sum of sensor readings in the network, which we can generalize to tree computations for any combination of continuous real-valued functions. Each of these primitives involves per-node communication costs that scale logarithmically with the number of nodes in the network, do not require public key cryptography, and are secure against arbitrary coalitions of malicious nodes. The broadcast authentication scheme achieves better properties with fewer assumptions than existing work, and the other new protocols have no known previous approach that do not require either expensive network-wide unicast or public key cryptography.

Thesis Committee:
Adrian Perrig (Chair)
Virgil D. Gligor
Anupam Gupta
Panganamala Ramana (P.R.) Kumar
Hui Zhang

Peter Lee, Head, Computer Science Department
Randy Bryant, Dean, School of Computer Science

Keywords:
secure aggregation, sensor networks, data aggregation, authenticated communication, known topology networks