Dr. Cristina Nita-Rotaru
Purdue University

Abstract

In recent years, network coding has emerged as a new communication paradigm that can significantly improve the efficiency of network protocols by requiring intermediate nodes to mix packets before forwarding them. Recently, several real-world systems have been proposed to leverage network coding in wireless networks. Although the theoretical foundations of network coding are well understood, a real-world system needs to solve a plethora of practical aspects before network coding can meet its promised potential. These practical design choices expose network coding systems to a wide range of attacks.

In this talk we focus on addressing a severe and generic attack against network coding systems, known as packet pollution attack. We show that existing cryptographic mechanisms that were proposed to solve the problem have a prohibitive cost that makes them impractical in wireless mesh networks. We propose the first practical defense mechanisms to pollution attacks in network coding for wireless mesh networks. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanisms can effectively filter out polluted packets and quickly identify and isolate attacker nodes while incurring small computation and bandwidth overhead.

Bio

Cristina Nita-Rotaru is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University where she established the Dependable and Secure Distributed Systems Laboratory (DS^2). She is a member of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), and is associated with the Center for Wireless Systems and Applications (CWSA). Her research interests lie in designing distributed systems, network protocols and applications that are dependable and secure, while maintaining expected levels of performance.

More information is available at: http://homes.cerias.purdue.edu/~crisn/