CAREER: Protecting against Layer-Violating Attacks in Wireless Networks

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.

Yih-Chun Hu