CAREER: Make Them Pay! Algorithms for Securing Wireless Systems

该奖项全部或部分由《2021年美国救援计划法案》（公法117-2）资助。无线系统通常由能量受限的设备填充，并且通过共享信道进行通信。这些特点使得这样的系统特别容易受到干扰，即对手破坏共享信道，迫使设备消耗大量能量以减轻攻击。本研究的目标是设计和分析节能的新型防御，同时仍然提供对抗强大干扰对手的性能保证。这项研究的结果有可能保护系统免受这些攻击，其严重程度可能会随着无线技术的不断采用而升级。该项目将其目标与密西西比州立大学本科生和研究生的课程开发和研究机会相结合。该项目采用的方法不同于先前的干扰缓解工作，这些工作只关注正确设备所产生的能量成本。在实践中，对抗性设备也必须消耗能量来阻塞通道，本研究的目的是设计利用这方面的防御。具体来说，该项目旨在开发以下算法：1)保证正确的设备可以在干扰的情况下完成计算任务；2)在没有攻击的情况下节能；3)在攻击进行时，相对于正确的设备，对手的成本会逐渐增加；这种算法被称为资源竞争算法。从广义上讲，该项目侧重于通信和协调任务，作为许多无线协议的基本构建块。通过提供对这些任务的资源竞争处理，本研究解决了有可能提高一系列应用安全性的理论问题。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.