Contact: Sonja Buchegger
Site: Cheater Detection and Isolation in Mobile ad-hoc Networks
(MICS Undergraduate Research Project)
Mobile ad-hoc networks can be formed spontaneoulsy by devices that want to communicate. The devices, or network nodes, cooperate and send data on for other nodes, when their wireless range is too short to reach the destination in one hop. The network only works when the nodes help one another, but it would be easy for a node to exploit the cooperation of others and to save energy by cheating and denying service or to mount other security attacks. In order to detect these cheating nodes and to make it unprofitable for them to cheat, we developed a distributed reputation system called CONFIDANT, which is short for Cooperation Of Nodes – Fairness In Dynamic Ad-hoc NeTworks.
Tasks:
To see the impact of cheating in a mobile ad-hoc network and to find out about the effect of CONFIDANT in a real-world scenario, it would be useful to have an implementation of CONFIDANT not just in a simulation but on laptops. APE http://apetestbed.sourceforge.net/ is short for Ad hoc Protocol Evaluation testbed, it is a Linux-based platform that aims at making the process of real-world experiments and evaluation easier. The APE project started as a research project at the Department of Computer Systems at Uppsala University. One goal is to modify the existing routing protocol implementation to be enhanced by CONFIDANT, another task is to find several students with laptops and choreograph experiments, and then to evaluate the outcome.
References: http://icapeople.epfl.ch/sbuchegg/reputation.html
Required Skills: Basic programming skills and not being afraid of Linux or Unix.
Benefits: You would learn about mobile ad-hoc networks and security and cooperation aspects as well as how to implement networking functions in Linux. You can design your own experiments and rush around students at your will.
Domain: Formal analysis, methods, frameworks; Network performance analysis; Protocol design and implementation; Security
Student info: Cedric Tissieres