Security is a enabler for nearly every service offered by a software system or a hardware device. Security mechanisms mitigate attacks that aim to disrupt normal service. My research focuses on novel and practical security mechanisms geared for current, emerging and envisaged computing settings, such as storage and file systems, peer-to-peer systems, sensor and ad-hoc wireless networks.
Existing practical security solutions for these applications often do not meet theoretical security requirements and theoretical solutions are infeasible and/or unusable in practical systems. Therefore, one of the major challenges lies in narrowing the gap between the state-of-art cryptographic solutions and existing practical security solutions as well as continuing to identify and resolve new security problems. Most of my research involves provable security as well as actual system implementation followed by evaluation and experiments in realistic settings.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems and applications have caused a revolutionary paradigm shift in building large-scale distributed systems over the Internet. My research focuses on one important category of P2P systems, so-called "cooperative" P2P systems, where peer nodes are close-knit, forming a "community of common interest" with shared goals and mutual benefits. Services that can be supported by cooperative P2P systems cover a wide variety of networked applications and distributed computing.
Storage networks have become critical components of computing environments and are evolving into complex, networked and distributed storage models. With the growth in the number of organizations resorting to electronic data and on-line access, there has been a large increase in the amount of sensitive data stored on-line. Furthermore, this data has to be shared, replicated, and kept on-line. As a result, storage systems are becoming more vulnerable to security breaches, which can result in damaging losses.
Sensor networks have received a lot of attention due to many current and envisaged applications. Typically, sensor nodes are inexpensive and require no infrastructure for long-term deployments. They can collaboratively gather information through wireless communication. However, sensor nodes are resource constrained, and their unattended nature increases the probability of capture, modification and cloning. Therefore, defending sensor networks from potential attackers is a formidable challenge. My research addresses various aspects of security in wireless and sensor networks.
Many of distributed and collaborative applications (e.g., conferencing, white-boards, and command-and-control systems) need secure communication. However, experience shows that security mechanisms for collaborative peer groups tend to be both expensive and complex. My research focuses on group key management and admission control problem. Group key management refers to the set of mechanisms to create, maintain and destroy the group key.