Living on the Edge Dependably: New Challenges and Solution Directions

Edge computing is the practice of placing computing resources at the edges of the Internet in close proximity to devices and information sources. This, much like a cache on a CPU, increases bandwidth and reduces latency for applications but at a potential cost of dependability and capacity

Software-Only System-Level Record and Replay in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are plagued by the possibility of bugs manifesting only at deployment. However, debugging deployed WSNs is challenging for several reasons—the remote location of deployed sensor nodes, the non-determinism of execution that can make it difficult to replicate a buggy run, and the limited hardware resources available on a node. In particular, existing solutions to record and replay debugging in WSNs fail to capture the complete code execution, thus negating the possibility of a faithful replay and causing a large class of bugs to go unnoticed. In short, record and replay logs a trace of predefined events while a deployed application is executing, enabling replaying of events later using debugging tools. Existing recording methods fail due to the many sources of non-determinism and the scarcity of resources on nodes. In this paper we introduce a software-only approach for deterministic record and replay of WSN nodes. The approach records all sources of non-determinism, based on the observation that such information is compressible using a combination of techniques specialized for respective sources. Despite their domain-specific nature, the techniques presented are applicable to the broader class of resource-constrained embedded systems

Secure Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract. Wireless Sensor Networks are increasingly being used for data monitoring in commercial, industrial, and military applications. Security is of great concern from many different viewpoints: ensuring that sensitive data does not fall into wrong hands; ensuring that the received data has not been doctored; and ensuring that the network is resilient to denial of service attacks. We study the fundamental problem of Secure Neighbor Discovery problem, which is critical to protecting the network against a number of different forms of attacks. Sensor networks, deployed in hazardous environment, are exposed to a variety of attacks like eavesdropping, message tampering, selective forwarding, wormhole and sybil attacks. Attacks against the data traffc can be addressed using cryptographic techniques. We frst present an effcient and scalable key-distribution protocol which is completely secure in the absence of colluding malicious nodes. Secure neighbor discovery can help to defend against a majority of the attacks against control traffc. We consider a static network and propose a secure one-hop neighbor discovery protocol. We show by analysis that this protocol effectively prevents two non-neighboring nodes from becoming neighbors even when both the nodes have been compromised by the adversary. We then extend this protocol so that it works even when nodes are incrementally deployed in the network. We also brie y study how this protocol could be modifed for mobile sensor networks. Finally, we compare our protocol with existing neighbor discovery protocols and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of using these protocols