DIMACS Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Security
November 3 - 4, 2004
DIMACS Center, CoRE Building, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
- Organizers:
- Bill Arbaugh, University of Maryland, waa@cs.umd.edu
Presented under the auspices of the
Special Focus on Communication Security and Information Privacy.
The rapid growth of both voice and data wireless communications has resulted in several serious security
problems in both the voice and data spaces. Unfortunately, many of the early security mistakes made with
wireless voice communications were repeated with data communications, i.e. the use of flawed authentication
and confidentiality algorithms. For example, the standards committee for 802.11 left many
of the difficult security issues such as key management and a robust authentication mechanism as open
problems. This has led many organizations to use either a permanent fixed cryptographic variable or no
encryption with their wireless networks. Since wireless networks provide an adversary a network access point
that is beyond the physical security controls of the organization, security can be a problem. Similarly,
attacks against WEP, the link-layer security protocol for 802.11 networks can exploit design
failures to successfully attack such networks. This workshop will focus on addressing the many outstanding
issues that remain in wireless cellular and WLAN networking such as (but not limited to): Management and
monitoring; ad-hoc trust establishment; secure roaming between overlay networks; availability and denial of
service mitigation; and network and link layer security protocols. We will seek to extend work on ad hoc
networking from a non-adversarial setting, assuming a trusted environment, to a more realistic setting in
which an adversary may attempt to disrupt communication. We will investigate a variety of approaches to
securing ad hoc networks, in particular ways to take advantage of their inherent redundancy (multiple routes
between nodes), replication, and new cryptographic schemes such as threshold cryptography.
Next: Call for Participation
Workshop Index
DIMACS Homepage
Contacting the Center
Document last modified on August 16, 2004.