Events - Colloquia & Seminars

CCIS Colloquium Spring 2006

Scalability and Security in Self-Organizing Wireless Networks

Speaker: Jakob Eriksson

Affiliation: University of California, Riverside

Date: Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Talk: 12:00 pm, 366 WVH

Abstract

With the advent of cheap, consumer-owned, wireless networking technology, major changes in the fundamentals of contemporary networking are under way, replacing customers and providers with anonymous peers, and wires with antennas. As networking becomes increasingly open, wireless, and disorganized, many new challenges arise. In my talk, will present two of my main contributions to this field: DART, and TrueLink.

DART: Dynamic Address RouTing, was the first routing protocol for ad hoc and mesh networks to support a table size logarithmic in the size of the network. As a node moves, DART dynamically assigns it a routing address that corresponds to its current location in the network. Consequently, DART can route packets in a highly hierarchical fashion, with large scalability gains. An elegant technique for finding the current routing address of a node is also provided.

TrueLink is the first practical and comprehensive countermeasure to the powerful "Wormhole" attack in wireless networks. Using a wormhole attack, malicious parties are able to cause widespread disruption in a network, using few and readily available resources. In contrast with previously proposed methods, TrueLink requires no synchronization, no overhearing assumptions, and can be implemented on standard IEEE 802.11 hardware.

Biography

Jakob Eriksson is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California, Riverside, working with advisors Michalis Faloutsos and Srikanth Krishnamurthy. He received his M.S. degree in Computer Science in 1998 from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. His main research interests are in open networks, wired and wireless, and the design and implementation of protocols, tools and prototypes to facilitate their widespread adoption. Before starting his Ph.D. studies, Jakob spent the .com boom as a software developer, teacher and entrepreneur in Stockholm. He is also a serial intern, having recently visited NEC Laboratories, Microsoft Research, and Intel Research - Berkeley.