Infrastructure for Securing Dynamic Tactical MANETs Research and Education

Abstract

Wireless networks play an increasingly crucial role in supporting tactical applications. Significant research has conducted to assure secure communication and trustworthy data delivery to enable proper response to scenarios that threaten the availability of wireless communications. This is especially critical for Army as this force consists of heterogeneous nodes that operate in a complex wireless environment. In such a highly dynamic, network centric environment, secure communication and trustworthy data delivery remain challenging because mobile nodes operate in the absence of supporting infrastructure, requiring nodes to collaborate in order to provide secure data exchange in the mission critical applications. Existing research has made great advancement in theoretic foundations and protocol design. Few efforts have shown the applicability and scalability of the theoretic-based re- search to real-world scenarios. This proposal aims to build an infrastructure that measures, tests, and evaluates various practical parameters when validating existing and new security- oriented research problems in mission-critical tasks under real environments. It targets to bridge the gap between theoretic study and system implementation and further provide valuable performance evaluation feedback to enhance the theoretic study in Armys future wireless systems. More specifically, the proposed infrastructure will allow us to address the following three key challenges limiting current small-scale wireless security prototypes in lab environments: (1) partitioning the communication and computation among the devices to balance cost, accuracy, energy consumption and resource constraints, (2) providing a general framework to detect and defend multiple threats in tactical MANETs, and (3) integrating research into education to involve students participating in red team evaluation and competition, which will benefit both research and curriculum development. The abstract is publicly releasable.

Document Details

Document Type
DoD Grant Award
Publication Date
Oct 15, 2018
Source ID
W911NF1710178

Entities

People

  • Yingying Chen

Organizations

  • Army Contracting Command
  • Stevens Institute of Technology
  • United States Army

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Strategic Security Studies