Wednesday, Octoberr 8, 2008
10:00AM, STII, Room 430A

A Multi-channel Defense Against Communication Denial-of-Service Attacks in Wireless Networks

Ghada Matooq Alnifie

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are distributed systems consisting of tiny self-powered nodes equipped with radios, environmental sensors, memory and processing capabilities. Due to their unattended functioning and over-the-air communication WSNs are particularly vulnerable to link-level denial of service (DoS) attacks. The major contribution of this dissertation is to provide an immediate, autonomous and robust method for data exfiltration through the use of parallel communication paths in response to a communication DoS attack.

Our approach uses a hybrid Medium Access Control layer consisting of both CSMA and time-slotted channel access mechanisms. We define and analyze a set of distributed transmission scheduling algorithms for use in the attacked region. To implement our techniques, we develop a distributed protocol called MULEPRO that is capable of delivering data from the attacked area to a communication basestation. Extensive experimental evaluation shows that under many attack scenarios our approach achieves a data delivery rate comparable to pre-attack conditions.

Dissertation director: Dr. Robert Simon