Research > Faculty Projects

Secure Network Initialization and Multi-Group Key Management for Sensor Networks

Principal Investigator
Raadhakrishnan Poovendran

Sponsor(s)
Telcordia Technologies Inc.
Army

Award Period
10/01/2002 - 09/30/2008

Abstract
The scope of our research includes developing cost-based trade-offs for providing the various security properties that we determine are needed at each stage of network initialization including beaconing, neighbor discovery, topology determination, and route determination. Key management characteristics include entity authentication, freshness, perfect forwards/backwards secrecy, explicit key confirmation, and whether all members contribute to the agreed upon key. We will explore methods of providing these characteristics in a coordinated fashion throughout network initialization such that our overall strong security goals are achieved. We will attempt to answer questions such as whether we can postpone performing entity authentication until after our network topology has been pruned.

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