ACI project "SPLASH!"
 

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• The fourth SPLASH meeting was held on August 25, 2005 at INRIA (Grenoble).
• Participants: C.Castelluccia, P. Michiardi, R.Molva and P.Mutaf.
• Meeting minutes are available on demand.
  

• SPLASH report (March 31, 2005): SPLASH activity report is available (on demand).

• The third SPLASH meeting was held on December 13, 2004 at Eurecom Institute
• Participants: Gene Tsudik (UCI), Pars Mutaf (INRIA), Claudio Lavecchia (Eurecom), Pietro Michiardi (EURECOM), Refik Molva (EURECOM)
  
• Meeting minutes are available on demand.

• The second SPLASH meeting was held on August 20, 2004 at Eurecom Institute
• Participants: Pars Mutaf (INRIA), Claude Castelluccia (INRIA), Pietro Michiardi (EURECOM), Refik Molva (EURECOM)
  
• Presentations and discussed topics:
• A new group key distribution mechanism for ad hoc networks (INRIA)
  
• A new key distribution and access control mechanism (INRIA)
• A new bandwidth defense technique called compact neighbor discovery (INRIA)
• A new broadcast authentication technique using ID-based hash-chains (EURECOM)
• Presentation of the CORE testbed and experimental results (EURECOM)
  
  
• CORE testbed under construction (by Claudio Lavecchia): CORE (COoperation enforcement based on REputation) is a novel cooperation enforcement technique designed by Eurecom (Pietro Michiardi and Refik Molva). Currently,  Claudio Lavecchia is participating to the design and evaluation of CORE. In particular, he built a CORE testbed. "The testbed will help understand mobile nodes' response to CORE in a real MANET (Mobile Adhoc Network) environment", reports Claudio Lavecchia.
  
  
• Recently submitted papers (July 2004 update):
• ID-based hash chains for broadcast authentication in wireless networks, Pietro Michiardi, Refik Molva. Submitted to Infocom 2005.
• Non cooperative forwarding in ad hoc networks, Eitan Altman, Arzad A. Kherani, Pietro Michiardi, Refik Molva. Submitted to Infocom 2005.
• Elsevier - Ad hoc Networks Journal (Special Issue), Analysis of Coalition Formation and Cooperation Strategies in Mobile Ad hoc Networks, Pietro Michiardi, Refik Molva.
• Compact Neighbor Discovery: A bandwidth defense through bandwidth optimization, Pars Mutaf, Claude Castelluccia. Submitted to Infocom 2005.
• DoS-resistant Self-Keying Mobile Ad hoc Network, Claude Castelluccia, Jeong Hyun Yi. Submitted to Infocom 2005.
 
• ESAS'04: First European Workshop On Security in AdHoc and Sensor Networks !
• May 2004 activity report (in french) by Pietro Michiardi contains the latest achievements of the Eurecom team (new publications, collaborations and more!).
• A new paper by Claude Castelluccia, "Cryptographically Generated Addresses for Constrained Devices", to be appeared in Wireless Personal Communications journal, special issue on:"Security for Next Generation Mobile Communications" by end of 2004.
Abstract: Cryptographically Generated Addresses (CGAs) have been designed to  solve the so-called IPv6  Address Ownership problem. The current IETF CGA proposal relies on RSA signature. Generating an RSA signature is quite expensive and might be prohibitive for small devices with limited capacities. For example,  a 1024-RSA signature requires approximately 1536 modular multiplications. In this paper, we propose a new CGA scheme whose verification requires fewer than 10 modular multiplications. We achieve this performance gain by (1) selecting an efficient signature scheme, namely the small prime variation of the Feige-Fiat-Shamir scheme and (2) tuning the cryptographic parameters of this signature scheme to the security strength of the CGA (i.e. the size of the hash function used to generate it).
• New projects in progress (last updated April 23, 2004):
• Robust Self-Securing Ad Hoc Networks
We are currently working on a protocol that allows two nodes of a Mobile Ad-hoc network to compute a shared key without communicating. Such service is important to secure routing protocols. Our scheme is based on the novel combination of two techniques: key predistribution  and threshold secret sharing. Each node only needs to store a small numbers of keys that is independent of the network size. The proposed scheme is secure against collusion of a certain number of compromised nodes and authorization servers. Furthermore it is robust and DoS-resistant since a node that joins a network can efficiently verify each share  it obtains from the different authorization servers and potentially trace bogus ones.
• DOS-resistant Route Discovery
We are also looking for DOS-resistant algorithms and protocols for Route Discovery in on demand ad hoc routing protocols such as DSR and AODV.  A malicious application such as a virus (or, a simple hack) can flood the network with route request packets to find new hosts to infect and/or consume bandwidth. In ad-hoc environments, nodes join and leave the network, or change their address without informing the other nodes. As a consequence, there is no reliable way for intermediate nodes to detect which route request is valid. We are looking for cryptographic and non-cryptoghaphic defenses against this attack.
• ... more to come (stay tuned).
• Recent events
• February 2004: Claudio Lavecchia (Eurecom) has joined the SPLASH team!
• Claude Castelluccia was at ARO'04 (Army Research Office) Workshop on information assurance in mobile wireless networks
• On January 15, 2004 Pars Mutaf  finished his PhD thesis on "Signaling optimizations for neighbor discovery, paging and mobility management in IPv6". Pars has joined the SPLASH project and is working as a full time scientific engineer, since March 2004.