CAREER

With the continuing proliferation of wireless technology, a wide spectrum of emerging applications using this technology will be tightly interwoven into the fabric of our everyday lives: wireless sensor networks can monitor personal health or critical infrastructures. The viability and success of many of these applications critically hinges on the availability of the underlying wireless communication. As wireless networks become increasingly pervasive, the problem of radio interference and jamming will be inevitable, raising a serious threat to the availability of wireless services.

To assert their legitimacy, French kings were borne under witness, and awoke, bathed, and dressed in public. America's Congress implemented a Freedom of Information Act to create methods for citizens to audit their government. These examples show how traditionally, organizations establish their legitimacy through protocols for disclosure. But disclosure has its practical limits; even organizations need a modicum of privacy.

The World Wide Web is a critical infrastructure that serves our society by facilitating information exchange, business and education. As it continues to evolve, the number of web-based attacks that target innocent web users keeps increasing. Examples of such attacks include Cross-site Scripting, SQL Injection and Cross-site Request Forgery. Recent attacks on end-users and online enterprises through these virulent attacks have resulted in widespread damage.

Several fundamental security mechanisms for restricting access to network resources rely on the ability of a reference monitor to inspect the contents of traffic as it traverses the network. However, with the increasing popularity of cryptographic protocols the traditional means of inspecting packet contents to enforce security policies is no longer a viable approach as message contents are concealed by encryption.

Wireless mesh networks are emerging as a promising robust low-cost network architecture able to provide increased coverage and larger bandwidth, resulting in higher quality of service and information availability. Many distributed applications provided on wireless mesh networks enable collaborations and sharing of information. Such applications benefit from scalable, robust and secure group services such as one-to-many or many-to-many multicast and distributed data access.