Thesis Defense - Deng

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are rapidly emerging as an important new area in the research community. To prevent sensor networks from various kinds of digital and physical attacks, security protection is very important. However, security mechanisms on sensor networks are different from traditional wireless networks due to its resource constraints. In my thesis, I designed, implemented, and evaluated a set of light weight security mechanisms for sensor networks. These mechanisms aim to provide intrusion tolerance, reliability, and fault tolerance for wireless sensor networks.

Specifically, the mechanisms include: setting up a secure, redundant, scalable, and intrusion tolerant routing scheme for wireless sensor network; setting up and maintaining a secure hierarchical wireless sensor network to support scalable in-network data processing; an intrusion tolerant pairwise key establishment scheme; and a set of decorrelating mechanisms to defend against traffic analysis attacks in wireless sensor networks. The implementations and simulations show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed mechanisms.