CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Monday, May 14, 2012
Time: 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker:  Vashek Matyáš, Harvard CRCS and Masaryk University Brno, CZ

Title:  Design of privacy mechanisms for wireless sensor networks with intrusion detection

Abstract:  Wireless sensor networks often have to be protected not only against an active attacker who tries to disrupt network operations, but also against a passive attacker looking for some sensitive information like the location of a certain node or information about the movement of a tracked object. To address such issues, we can use an intrusion detection system and a privacy mechanism simultaneously. However, both of these often come with contradictory aims.  A privacy mechanism typically tries to hide a relation between various events while an intrusion detection system tries to link the events up.

This talk will present and explore some of the problems that might occur when such techniques are brought together and we also provide some ideas how these problems could be solved. Other related work on simulations (of wireless sensor networks), experiments with evolutionary algorithms for protocol design, and our attempts to provide a semi-automated framework that optimizes the configuration of an intrusion detection system in terms of detection accuracy and memory usage shall be also mentioned.

Bio:  Vashek Matyáš is a Fulbright-Masaryk Visiting Scholar at the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at Harvard University and a Professor at the Masaryk University Brno, CZ. His research interests relate to applied cryptography and security. He worked with Microsoft Research Cambridge, University College Dublin, Ubilab at UBS AG, and was a Royal Society Postdoctoral Fellow with the Cambridge University Computer Lab. Vashek edited the Computer and Communications Security Reviews, and worked on the development of Common Criteria and with ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27.