As sensor networks edge closer towards wide-spread deployment, security issues become a central concern. So far, the main research focus has been on making sensor networks feasible and useful, and less emphasis was placed on security. We design a suite of security...

ly, the remote procedure call problem, which an RPC protocol undertakes to solve, consists of emulating LPC using message passing. LPC has a number of "properties" -- a single procedure invocation results in exactly one execution of the procedure body, the result returned is reliably delivered to the invoker, and exceptions are raised if (and only if) an error occurs. Given a completely reliable communication environment, which never loses, duplicates, or reorders messages, and given client and server processes that never fail, RPC would be trivial to solve. The sender would merely package the invocation into one or more messages, and transmit these to the server. The server would unpack the data into local variables, perform the desired operation, and send back the result (or an indication of any exception that occurred) in a reply message. The challenge, then, is created by failures. Were it not for the possibility of process and machine crashes, an RPC protocol capable of overcomi...

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Andrew is a distributed computing environment that is a synthesis of the personal computing and timesharing paradigms. When mature, it is expected to encompass over 5,000 workstations spanning the Carnegie Mellon University campus. This paper examines the security issues that arise in such an environment and describes the mechanisms that have been developed to address them. These mechanisms include the logical and physical separation of servers and clients, support for secure communication at the remote procedure call level, a distributed authentication service, a file-protection scheme that combines access lists with UNIX mode bits, and the use of encryption as a basic building block. The paper also discusses the assumptions underlying security in Andrew and analyzes the vulnerability of the system. Usage experience reveals that resource control, particularly of workstation CPU cycles, is more important than originally anticipated and that the mechanisms available to address this issue are rudimentary.

A digital home network is a cluster of digital audio/visual (A/V) devices including set-top boxes, TVs, VCRs, DVD players, and general-purpose computing devices such as personal computers. The network may receive copyrighted digital multimedia content from a number of sources. This content may be broadcast via satellite or terrestrial systems, transmitted by cable operators, or made available as prepackaged media (e.g., a digital tape or a digital video disc). Before releasing their content for distribution, the content owners may require protection by specifying access conditions. Once the content is delivered to the consumer, it moves across home the network until it reaches its destination where it is stored or displayed. A copy protection system is needed to prevent unauthorized access to bit streams in transmission from one A/V device to another or while it is in storage on magnetic or optical media. Recently, two fundamental groups of technologies, encryption and watermarking, have been identified for protecting copyrighted digital multimedia content. This paper is an overview of the work done for protecting content owners’ investment in intellectual property.

and the United States Postal Service. The views and conclusions in this document are my own and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of any supporting organization or the U.S. Government.

We describe ALARM-NET, a wireless sensor network for assisted-living and residential monitoring. It integrates environmental and physiological sensors in a scalable, heterogeneous architecture. A query protocol allows real-time collection and processing of sensor data by user interfaces and back-end analysis programs. One such program determines circadian activity rhythms of residents, feeding activity information back into the sensor network to aid context-aware power management, dynamic privacy policies, and data association. Communication is secured end-to-end to protect sensitive medical and operational information. The ALARM-NET system has been implemented as a network of MICAz sensors, stargate gateways, iPAQ PDAs, and PCs. Customized infrared motion and dust sensors, and integrated temperature, light, pulse, and blood oxygenation sensors are present. Software components include: TinyOS query processor and security modules for motes; AlarmGate, an embedded Java application for managing power, privacy, security, queries, and client connections; Java resident monitoring and sensor data querying applications for PDAs and PCs; and a circadian activity rhythm analysis program. We show the correctness, robustness, and extensibility of the system architecture through a scenario-based evaluation of the integrated ALARM-NET system, as well as performance data for individual software components. 1

Process groups are a common abstraction for fault-tolerant computing in distributed systems. We present a security architecture that extends the process group into a security abstraction. Integral parts of this architecture are services that securely and fault tolerantly support cryptographic key distribution. Using replication only when necessary, and introducing novel replication techniques when it was necessary, we have constructed these services both to be easily defensible against attack and to permit key distribution despite the transient unavailabil-ity ofa substantial number of servers. We detail the design andimplementation of these services and the secure process group abstraction they support. We also give preliminary performance figures for some common group operations.

There is increasing growth in the number of computer networks in use and in the kinds of distributed computing applications available on these networks This increase, together with concern about privacy, security, and integrity of information exchange, has created considerable interest in the use of encryptlon to protect information in the networks

This paper describes the CAST design procedure for constructing a family of DES-like Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) cryptosystems which appear to have good resistance to differential cryptanalysis, linear cryptanalysis, and related-key cryptanalysis, along with a number of other desirable cryptographic properties. Details of the design choices in the procedure are given, including those regarding the component substitution boxes (s-boxes), the overall framework, the key schedule, and the round function. An example CAST cipher, an output of this design procedure, is presented as an aid to understanding the concepts and to encourage detailed analysis by the cryptologic community.