Report on a Working Session on Security in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

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Toward a Formal Model of Fair Exchange - a Game Theoretic Approach

A fair exchange protocol is a protocol, in which two (or more) mutually suspicious parties exchange their digital items in a way that neither party can gain an advantage over the other by misbehaving. Many fair exchange protocols have been proposed in the academic literature, but they provide rather different types of fairness. The formal comparison of these proposals remained difficult, mainly, because of the lack of a common formal framework, in which each can be modelled and formal fairness definitions can be given. In this paper, we propose to use game theory for this purpose. We show how to represent fair exchange protocols with game trees and give three definitions of fairness using standard game theoretic notions. We are not aware of any other work that uses the apparatus of game theory for modelling fair exchange protocols

Secure positioning in wireless networks

So far, the problem of positioning in wireless networks has been studied mainly in a nonadversarial setting. In this paper, we analyze the resistance of positioning techniques to position and distance spoofing attacks. We propose a mechanism for secure positioning of wireless devices, that we call verifiable multilateration. We then show how this mechanism can be used to secure positioning in sensor networks. We analyze our system through simulations

Joint Mobility and Routing for Lifetime Elongation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Although many energy efficient/conserving routing protocols have been proposed for wireless sensor networks, the concentration of data traffic towards a small number of base stations remains a major threat to the network lifetime. The main reason is that the sensor nodes located near a base station have to relay data for a large part of the network and thus deplete their batteries very quickly. The solution we propose in this paper suggests that the base station be mobile; in this way, the nodes located close to it change over time. Data collection protocols can then be optimized by taking both base station mobility and multi-hop routing into account. We first study the former, and conclude that the best mobility strategy consists in following the periphery of the network (we assume that the sensors are deployed within a circle). We then consider jointly mobility and routing algorithms in this case, and show that a better routing strategy uses a combination of round routes and short paths. We provide a detailed analytical model for each of our statements, and corroborate it with simulation results. We show that the obtained improvement in terms of network lifetime is in the order of 500%

Enforcing Service Availability in Mobile Ad-Hoc WANs

In this paper, we address the problem of service availability in mobile ad-hoc WANs. We present a secure mechanism to stimulate end users to keep their devices turned on, to refrain from overloading the network, and to thwart tampering aimed at converting the device into a ``selfish`` one. Our solution is based on the application of a tamper resistant security module in each device and cryptographic protection of messages

Telecommunication Services Engineering- Definitions, Architectures and Tools

This paper introduces telecommunication services engineering through a definition of services, of network architectures that run services, and of methods, techniques and tools used to develop services. We emphasize the Intelligent Network (IN), the Telecommunication Management Network (TMN) and TINA architecture

SOWER: Self-­Organizing Wireless Network for Messaging

Short Message Service (SMS) has become extremely popular in many countries, and represents a multi-billion dollars market. Yet many consumers consider that the price cellular network operators charge for it is too high. In this paper, we explain that there exist alternatives to cellular networks for the provision of SMS. In particular, we present the Self-Organizing Wireless messaging nEtwoRk (SOWER), an all-wireless network operable in cities. In SOWER, each user installs a wireless, power-plugged, device at home and communicates by means of a mobile device. Based on our experimental measurements of IEEE 802.11 equipped devices, we show the feasibility of the concept in various urban scenarios. We also show that city-wide connectivity can be achieved even with a limited market penetration. We propose an appropriate routing protocol, and we explain that the capacity of such networks is sufficient to support messaging communication

A Formal Model of Rational Exchange and Its Application to the Analysis of Syverson's Protocol

We propose a formal model of rational exchange and exchange protocols in general, which is based on game theory. In this model, an exchange protocol is represented as a set of strategies in a game that is played by the protocol parties and the network that they use to communicate with each other. Within this model, we give a formal definition for rational exchange and various other properties of exchange protocols, including fairness. In particular, rational exchange is defined in terms of a Nash equilibrium in the protocol game. We also study the relationship between rational and fair exchange, and prove that fairness implies rationality, but not vice versa. Finally, we illustrate the usage of our formal model for the analysis of existing rational exchange protocols by analyzing a protocol proposed by Syverson. We show that the protocol is rational only under the assumption that the network is reliable

Energy-Efficient Broadcasting in All-Wireless Networks

In all-wireless networks, minimizing energy consumption is crucial as in most cases the nodes are battery-operated. We focus on the problem of power-optimal broadcast, for which it is well known that the broadcast nature of radio transmissions can be exploited to optimize energy consumption. This problem appears to be difficult to solve [30]. We provide a formal proof of NP-completeness for the general case and give an NP-completeness result for the geometric case; in the former, the network topology is represented by a generic graph with arbitrary weights, whereas in the latter a Euclidean distance is considered. For the general case, we show that it cannot be approximated better than O(log N), where N is the total number of nodes. We then describe an approximation algorithm that achieves the O(log N) approximation ratio. We also describe a new heuristic, Embedded Wireless Multicast Advantage. We show that it compares well with other proposals and we explain how it can be distribute