2 seminars:

Some solutions to defend against classical attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

May 27th, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Campus St Priest, room 50, bat 1

Marine Minier, CITI, INSA Lyon

In typical Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications, a large number of resource constrained sensor nodes are deployed over a geographic area in order to collect physical world data and route them towards one or few destinations called the sinks. The rapid deployment capabilities, due to the lack of infrastructure, as well as the self organized and potentially fault-tolerant nature of WSNs make them attractive for multiple applications spanning from environmental monitoring (temperature, pollution, etc.) to building-industrial automation (electricity/gaz/water metering, event detection, home automation etc.). Security is particularly challenging in WSNs. Because of their open and unattended deployment, in possibly hostile environments, adversaries can easily launch Denial-of-Service (Dos) attacks, cause physical damage to sensors, or even capture them to extract sensitive information.

In this talk, after a brief introduction concerning security challenges in WSNs, we will present several algorithms we have developed at the CITI laboratory. We first present an algorithm to detect Wormhole attacks using local neighboring information. We then introduce a new solution based upon universal hash functions to aggregate Message Authentication Codes. We then present our node replication detection mechanism that use a hierarchical structure and some Bloom filters. We finally introduce our last research direction that concerns resilience notion of WSN against attacks at routing protocol layer.

Scalar multiplication on smart cards and side-channel analysis

May 27th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Campus St Priest, room 50, bat 1

Vincent Verneuil, Inside Contactless, Aix-en-Provence

Scalar multiplication is the main operation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Its implementation on smart cards in an industrial context requires much effort in order to satisfy performance and security goals. Indeed short timing execution are required in many applications and must be achieved given the power and memory constraints of the smart cards. On the other hand the well known side-channel analysis can threaten the secrets manipulated by the card, such as secret scalars. Therefore numerous studies have proposed solutions for speeding-up the elliptic curve scalar multiplication and counterfeiting side-channel attacks. Not all of these solutions fit to the industrial smart card context however.