NeTS:Small: How to Exploit Social Network Theory in Designing Secure Wireless Networks

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。确保网络空间安全是保护我们国家基础设施的首要任务之一。由于无线自组织网络（wanet）已经被建立来访问或成为互联网的一部分，它们成为最薄弱的环节，应该得到保护和保护。本项目利用社会网络理论（包括图论、渗透理论和双曲几何等工具）研究wanet中的安全问题，如信任建立和管理、安全连接、高效安全路由及其性能。首先，利用实证社会网络研究的结果来提高我们对wanet中信任和物理网络图的性质、安全路径的存在和分布以及安全连通性的理解。其次，通过模拟个体的社会行为，建立了新的方法来设计高效、可扩展的wanet多跳通信方案。最后，研究了WANET作为端到端安全吞吐量和延迟的安全效率，并对安全网络性能和安全性与吞吐量/延迟之间的权衡进行了形式化分析。本课题为无线网络开辟了新的研究方向，发明了新的网络设计方法。建议的研究在许多方面具有广泛的影响，包括确保国家网络空间，创建混合社会学，数学和无线网络的多学科研究主题，通过期刊和会议出版物将研究成果传播给多个感兴趣的社区，以及为电信和信息产业培训未来的多学科工作人员。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Securing cyberspace is one of the top priorities in protecting our national infrastructure. As wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs) have been built to access or been parts of the Internet, they become the weakest links which should be secured and protected. This project investigates security issues in WANETs, such as trust establishment and management, secure connectivity, efficient secure routing and their performance, by utilizing the social network theory (including tools such as graph theory, percolation theory and hyperbolic geometry). First, the results in empirical social network studies are utilized to improve our understanding of the properties of the trust and physical network graphs, the existence and distribution of secure paths, and secure connectivity in WANETs. Second, by mimicking the social behavior of individuals, new methodologies are established to design efficient and scalable multi-hop communication schemes in WANETs. Finally, the project investigates the secure efficiency of a WANET as the end-to-end secure throughput and delay and conduct formal analysis of secure network performance and trade-off between security and throughput/delay. This project opens a new research direction in wireless networks and invents novel network design methodologies.The proposed research has broad impacts in many aspects including securing national cyberspace, creating multidisciplinary research themes mixing sociology, mathematics and wireless networks, disseminating the research findings to multiple communities of interest through publications in journals and conferences, and training the future multidisciplinary work force for telecommunications and information industries.