| NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | February 19, 2010 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 12, 2016 |
| Award Number: | 0953600 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Nina Amla
namla@nsf.gov (703)292-7991 CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | August 1, 2010 |
| End Date: | July 31, 2017 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $475,920.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $475,920.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2011 = $92,780.00 FY 2012 = $193,080.00 FY 2014 = $99,680.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
506 S WRIGHT ST URBANA IL US 61801-3620 (217)333-2187 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
506 S WRIGHT ST URBANA IL US 61801-3620 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
Special Projects - CNS, TRUSTWORTHY COMPUTING, Secure &Trustworthy Cyberspace |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001112DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001213DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
The PI is developing bottom-up mechanisms for securing wireless networks against a class of "layer-violating" attacks. In a layer-violating attack, the attacker uses protocol behavior at one layer of the network stack to compromise a secure protocol at a different layer. Such layer-violating attacks often can span from the physical layer all the way to the transport layer. In the PI's approach, each layer interlocks with the higher layer, relying on the security properties guaranteed by the lower layer to provide security properties to the next higher layer, resulting in a protocol stack that is resilient to layer-violating attacks. The PI's efforts focus on four important security properties: availability against jamming, fairness, routing, and privacy.
The outcomes of this research will be:
- A protocol stack secure against jamming at all layers, ensuring a specific level of performance despite the presence of an adversarial attacker
- A protocol stack that provides fairness regardless of attacks at any layer, and specifies the types of fairness achievable against a cross-layer adversarial attacker
- A results-oriented routing protocol that provides reliable performance assurances against attacks at any layer
- A protocol stack that provides privacy across all layers of the network stack, ensuring minimal leakage of privacy-sensitive information.
The PI is also revising the introductory programming curriculum in the ECE department; one aspect of this revision is an emphasis on safe and secure code writing. The PI is also working to develop a middle-school-level curriculum to encourage underprivileged groups to pursue engineering education.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This project has results in a number of separate areas.
In the area of MAC-aware attack mitigation, we develop a protocol that converges to optimal performance against both false reservations and MAC-aware jamming. In particular, against false reservations, we ensure that the long-term average power-spectral density is constant regardless of attacker reservations; in other words, attackers that do not use their reserved bandwidth have that bandwidth reclaimed by legitimate users. Against MAC-aware jamming, we transmit jamming-relevant information only to nodes that actively avoid reserved bandwidth-time slots. We also examined false channel reporting, where a user misreports his channel status, resulting in degraded performance for other network users.
In the area of cognitive radio, where secondary users use license bands that are unused by licensed (primary) users, we developed a new spectrum sensing technique based on Hermetian inner product which can detect primary user transmissions well below the noise floor.
In the area of health device security, we examined the claim in the literature that the electrocardiograph (ECG) signal would provide an accessible and secure key-generation source for same-body detection in body area networks. We discovered that many parts of the body do not receive ECG signals at sufficient signal strength to allow for good key generation. We developed an alternative approach, based on galvanic coupling below the action potential, to allow devices in contact with a body to share a key.
In the area of Internet security using application-layer information, we developed MiddlePolice, a cloud-based DDoS-mitigation approach that combines the in-cloud filtering of existing commercial approaches, together with a mechanism called “capabilities” in the academic approaches, to create an in-cloud, destination-driven enforcement of per-flow bandwidth allocations. MiddlePolice can enforce a wide variety of destination-specified policies with a single mechanism, and each destination can choose the traffic that it wishes to prioritize.
Finally, we developed Origin and Path Trace, which allows for per-packet hop-by-hop authentication of the origin and authentication of intermediate routers at line speed. Our key technique is the dynamically recreatable key: a key that can be created quickly at the router and shared with each source. This key can then be recreated on a per-packet basis at the router at speeds approaching a hundred gigabits on a commodity CPU.
Last Modified: 09/19/2017
Modified by: Yih-Chun Hu
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