May 12 , 2005, 11am, CS432
"Secure Range-Independent Localization for Wireless Sensor Networks"
Radha Poovendran, University of Washington

In many applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN), sensors are deployed un-tethered in hostile environments. For location aware WSN applications, it is essential to ensure that sensors can determine their location, even in the presence of malicious adversaries. In this talk we address the problem of enabling sensors of WSN to determine their location in an un-trusted environment. Since localization schemes based on distance estimation are expensive for the resource-constrained sensors, we propose a range-independent localization algorithm called SeRLoc. SeRLoc is distributed algorithm and does not require any communication among sensors. In addition, we show that SeRLoc is robust against severe WSN attacks, such as the wormhole attack, the Sybil attack and compromised sensors. We present a threat analysis and comparison of the performance of SeRLoc with state-of-the-art range-independent localization schemes. We also present a high-resolution extension to SeRLoc provide a number of methods for robust estimation of location. We will also discuss some of the hard problems that remain open.

Radha Poovendran is an assistant professor at the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Washington at Seattle. He received his PhD. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1999. His research interests are in the areas of applied cryptography for multiuser environment, networking, and Information Theory. He is a recipient of a number of awards from NSA, NSF, ARO, and ONR for his research contributions in the areas of wired and wireless security. He is also a recipient of a number of awards for teaching and advising within the university community. He is a co-program chair of the ACM Wireless Security (WiSe) 2005.