Indian Researcher's Improved Anti-Hacking System for Wireless Networks Asian News International (09/04/08)
as it appeared in the September 5, 2008 edition of ACM TechNews.
Florida Atlantic University researchers Avinash Srinivasan, Feng Li, and Jie Wu have developed the Probabilistic Voting-based Filtering Scheme (PVFS), which they say can protect and help improve the viability of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). WSNs are vulnerable to two types of cybersabotage, according to the International Journal of Security and Networks. The first is the fabricated report with false votes attack that sends phony data to the base stations with a forged validation. The second type of attack adds false validation votes to genuine incoming data, which labels genuine data as being false. Most WSN systems have built-in software to prevent false data from being given valid credentials, but the second type of attack is more difficult to detect. The researchers say the PVFS can counter both of these attacks simultaneously. To protect the WSN while maintaining normal filtering, the researchers use a general en-route filtering scheme that breaks WSNs into clusters and locks each cluster to a particular data encryption key. As data reaches the headquarters from the clusters, the main cluster-heads check the report together with the votes, acting as the verification nodes in PVFS. Should a saboteur compromise one or more of the sensors on a WSN, the PVFS will apply probability rules to determine the likelihood that the network was compromised, using data from other sensors in different clusters before reporting incoming data as false. Click Here to View Full Article
