CAREER: Make Them Pay! Algorithms for Securing Wireless Systems

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Wireless systems are often populated by energy-constrained devices, and communication occurs over a shared channel. These features make such systems especially vulnerable to jamming, whereby an adversary disrupts the shared channel, forcing devices to expend significant energy in order to mitigate the attack. The goal of this research is to design and analyze novel defenses that are energy-efficient, while still providing performance guarantees against a powerful jamming adversary. The outcomes of this research have the potential to secure systems against these attacks, whose severity is likely to escalate with the continued adoption of wireless technology. This project integrates its objectives with curriculum development and research opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students at Mississippi State University. The approach taken by this project differs from much of the prior work on jamming mitigation, which has focused solely on the energy cost incurred by correct devices. In practice, adversarial devices must also expend energy to jam the channel, and the aim of this research is to design defenses that exploit this aspect. Specifically, this project aims to develop algorithms that 1) guarantee correct devices can accomplish computational tasks despite jamming, 2) are energy-efficient in the absence of attack, and 3) impose an asymptotically-higher cost on the adversary relative to the correct devices when an attack is underway; such algorithms are called resource-competitive. Broadly, this project focuses on communication and coordination tasks that serve as fundamental building blocks for many wireless protocols. By providing a resource-competitive treatment of these tasks, this research addresses theoretical problems that have the potential to improve the security for a range of applicationsThis award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.