IEEE Gainesville Section Presents

Multi-user Broadcast Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Dr. Wenjing Lou, Professor of Department of Electrical and 
Computer Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Wednesday, October 31, 2007
11:40-12:40pm
330 Larsen Hall (Center Drive, University of Florida)


Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) usually consists of a large number 
of ultra-small, low-cost devices that have limited energy supply, 
computation, memory, and communication capacities. WSNs have drawn 
tremendous attention in the past few years due to their broad 
applications in both military and civilian domains. Security is 
essential to ensure the success of WSN applications, especially 
for those mission-critical applications working in unattended and 
even hostile environments. However, security design in WSNs has 
ever been a challenging task due to their open, distributed, 
compromise-prone, and resource-constrained nature. In fact, security 
of WSNs is currently a very active topic and there are many 
interesting and challenging research issues. 

In this talk, we will introduce our latest research on WSN security 
with a focus on multi-user broadcast authentication. Broadcast is an 
important communication type when a user starts to access a wireless 
sensor network, in order to retrieve desired information or to request 
some actions taken by sensor/actuator nodes. Broadcast authentication 
is a critical security service that allows the sensor nodes to verify 
the authenticity of the broadcast messages from mobile users of WSNs. 
Although symmetric-key based solutions such as ESLA and multilevel 
ESLA have been proposed, they all suffer from severe energy depletion 
attacks resulted from the nature of delayed message authentication. 
In this talk we will present several efficient public-key-based schemes 
to achieve immediate broadcast authentication and thus avoid the 
security vulnerability intrinsic to ESLA-like schemes. 


Biography: 

Wenjing Lou is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer 
Engineering department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She obtained 
her Ph.D degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University 
of Florida in 2003. Her current research interests are in ad hoc, sensor, 
and mesh networks, with emphases on network security and routing issues. 
She is an editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and is 
currently serving as the technical program co-chair for the general 
symposium, IEEE GLOBECOM 2007.  She also serves as TPC member for many 
conferences including INFOCOM, MOBIHOC, ICDCS, etc.


If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Michael Fang at 
(352) 846-3043 or fang@ece.ufl.edu.