MSc Tobias Heer from RWTH Aachen will give a guest lecture on Thursday 15.4. 14.15-16 at Kumpula in Exactum D122.

The title of the talk is: End-to-Middle Authentication in Multi-Hop Networks.

Welcome!

Abstract:

Wireless multi-hop networks are particularly susceptible to attacks based on flooding and the interception, tampering with, and forging of packets. Thus, reliable communication in such networks quintessentially depends on mechanisms to verify the authenticity of network traffic and the ascertainment of the identity of communicating peers. A major challenge to achieve this functionality are the tight resource constraints of such devices such as smartphones, mesh nodes, sensor nodes, and wireless routers with regard to CPU, memory, and energy. These restrictions require careful balancing between the tradeoffs implied by the different cryptographic primitives available. This talk presents and compares three different approaches to end-to-middle authentication, each achieving different goals and making different tradeoffs regarding performance, complexity, and security.

Short Bio:

Tobias is a PhD Student and Junior Researcher at the Distributed Systems Group at the RWTH Aachen. He is project manager for the network-related aspects of the Mobile ACcess Project. He was a member of the graduate school for software for communication systems from 2006 to 2009. His research focus is mobile communications, efficient end-host mobility, and network security. Tobias is actively involved in the development and standardization of the Host Identity Protocol in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Tobias began his studies in Computer Science at the University of Tübingen (Germany) in 2000 and graduated as a Diplom-Informatiker (MsC equiv.) in 2006. He was with the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) in Finland from October 2005 to May 2006 where he was working on his Diplomarbeit on Lightweight Authentication for the Host Identifier Protocol for which he was awarded the KuVS prize for the best Diploma thesis in 2007.