Secure Communications Over Hybrid Military Networks

Stealthiness can be described as a disposition to be sly and to do things surreptitiously. This paper presents a new architecture for flexible and secure networking in battlefields that enables stealthy and covert communication in the presence of node mobility. Our architecture is based on the combination of optical (fiber) and wireless links. Our objective is to be able to carry on undeterred communication without the attack/eavesdropping nodes being able to detect the presence of any communication. This objective is not only crucial for successful completion of the operation, but also for the safety of our mobile nodes, by not giving out their locations. We combine the advantages of optical links, such as high bandwidth, low delays, low error rates, good security, with the advantages of wireless links, such as mobility and flexibility, along with directional antennas for communication. From security point of view, we also assume presence of red zones, which are the ones controlled by the adversary or where the adversary can trace wireless activities

Localizing sensor networks in un-friendly environments

In this paper, we study the issue of defending against a wireless sensor network (WSN) that has been deployed by a malicious enemy agent in an area of interest to us. While there can be many approaches to defend against maliciously deployed WSNs, we propose the design of a localization centric approach. Specifically, the problem we address is: given an enemy deployed WSN in an area of interest to us, how can we determine locations of the sensors without co-operating with the sensors themselves during localization. In our approach, we employ a physically mobile agent called the localizer (e.g., a mobile robot) to move in the sensor network and detect raw sensor-to-sensor communication signals. However, the localizer has no information on the message content or the sensor id of any signal (possibly due to message encryption) since the sensors belong to an enemy agent. Based on estimating the angle of arrival and the received signal strength, we design a protocol for the localizer to determine sensor positions. The salient features of our protocol are efficient association of signals with sensors, and filtering many likely false locations over time. Sound theoretical analysis and extensive simulations are used to demonstrate the performance of our protocol from the perspective of localization accuracy

Developing an Inclusive K-12 Outreach Model

This paper outlines the longitudinal development of a K-12 outreachmodel, to promote Computer Science in Ireland. Over a three-yearperiod, it has been piloted to just under 9700 K-12 students fromalmost every county in Ireland. The model consists of a two-hourcamp that introduces students to a range of Computer Sciencetopics: addressing computing perceptions, introduction to codingand exploration of computational thinking. The model incorporateson-site school delivery and is available at no cost to any interestedschool across Ireland. The pilot study so far collected over 3400surveys (pre- and post-outreach delivery).Schools from all over Ireland self-selected to participate, includ-ing male only, female only and mixed schools. The no-cost natureof the model meant schools deemed disadvantaged , to privatefee-paying schools participated. Initial findings are very positive,including the balance of male and female participants, where in the2017-18 academic year it was 56:44 and in 2019-20 (to date), it is35:65 respectively. Once the model is validated and tweaked (basedon survey data), the model will be published (open access) for otherinstitutions to implement the model locally. In addition, the authorsintend to link schools (that the team have worked with over thethree years) with local institutions, thus developing a sustainableecosystem for the program to continue. This paper describes themodel structure and outlines early finding

Adaptive scalable protocols for . . .

The focus of this dissertation is to propose analytical models to study the impact of collisions and interference in heterogeneous wireless networks and propose simple scalable and lightweight protocols that use these models to adapt to network conditions thus increasing efficiency, decreasing energy consumption and prolonging network lifetime. The contributions of this dissertation are multifold and are summarized as follows: - Analytical models to study the impact of collisions and interference on both broadcast and unicast messages. These analytical models are incorporated into the proposed protocols to adapt to the prevailing network conditions to improve their performance. - Optimized Flooding Protocol (OFP) a geometric approach to achieve network wide broadcast of messages. The key advantages are - simple and stateless, minimizes the number of retransmissions and more importantly ability to adapt to network conditions to guarantee required reliability criteria. OFP is also extended to 3D networks and the performance is verified through rigorous simulations. - Adaptive Routing and Energy Management (AREM), an integrated routing and MAC protocol that uses the concept of random wakeup and forwarding set based routing to simultaneously conserve energy and achieve low latencies. Nodes adapt their transmission power to the prevailing network conditions to operate at optimal conditions, thus further improving the network lifetime and reducing latencies. - Efficient Co-ordination Protocol (ECP) that exploits high node redundancy to elect a small subset of nodes to perform network tasks. The subset of nodes is periodically rotated and each node is active for a duration proportional to its capabilities. The load is uniformly distributed among all nodes. - Adaptive Clustering Protocol (ACP), an efficient stateless scalable clustering protocol that adapts to network conditions and balances load among nodes. - Hierarchical Anonymous Communication Protocol novel protocol that prevents traffic analysis from revealing node information including its location. - Lightweight security protocol to preserve the integrity of messages in a wireless network even in presence of compromised nodes

Journal of Interconnection Networks c ○ World Scientific Publishing Company GEOMETRIC BROADCAST PROTOCOL FOR HETEROGENEOUS SENSOR NETWORKS

protocol for heterogeneous wireless sensor and actor networks. While broadcasting is a very energy expensive protocol, it is also widely used as a building block for a variety of other network layer protocols. Therefore, reducing the energy consumption by optimizing broadcasting is a major improvement in heterogenous sensor networking. GBS is a distributed algorithm where nodes make local decisions on whether to transmit based on a geometric approach. GBS does not need any neighborhood information and imposes very low communication overhead. GBS is scalable to the change in network size, node type, node density and topology. Furthermore it accommodates seamlessly such network changes, including the presence of actors in heterogeneous sensor networks. Indeed, GBS takes advantage of actor nodes, and uses their resources when possible, thus reducing the energy consumption by sensor nodes. Through simulation evaluations, we show that GBS is very scalable and its performance is improved by the presence of actors. At the best of our knowledge, GBS is the first broadcast protocol designed specifically for heterogeneous sensor and actor networks

Vehicle Path Verification using Wireless Sensor Networks

In Path Verification, a verifier needs to determine how closely a mobile node\u27s claimed path agrees with its actual path. We design a technique to leverage new or existing static wireless sensor networks to provide witness certificates to allow the verifier to compare actual paths with claimed paths of the vehicle as a notion of curve similarity. This is done by using Continuous Dynamic Time Warping to construct a manifold from the actual and claimed paths. The geodesic distance from the path origins to the path terminations over the surface of this manifold is analogous to the Fréchet Distance between the paths. Using simulations and experiments on city streets, we demonstrate the performance of our technique. We also propose lightweight cryptographic techniques to mitigate security attacks