After a brief overview of the security and privacy challenges raised by wireless networks, we will introduce a few fundamental notions of game theory. We will provide an overview of the way these notions have been used by several research groups to model rational behavior in security-related settings.

We will then present in detail two examples we recently addressed, one related to revocation in ephemeral (e.g., vehicular) networks and the other to pseudonym change in mix zones. Finally, we will present some of our recent results on secure neighbor discovery and distance bounding.

Note: some background information can be found in a recent book by L. Buttyan and JP Hubaux: "Security and Cooperation in Wireless Networks", Cambridge University Press, 2008. The pdf of the book is available at http://secowinet.epfl.ch

Kurzbiografie

Jean-Pierre Hubaux joined the faculty of EPFL in 1990. His research activity is focused on wireless networks, with a special interest in security and cooperation issues. In 1991, he designed the first curriculum in Communication Systems at EPFL. He was promoted to full professor in 1996. In 1999, he defined some of the main ideas of the National Competence Center in Research named "Mobile Information and Communication Systems" (NCCR/MICS); this center (still very active) was initially nicknamed "the Terminodes Project".

In this framework, he has notably defined, in close collaboration with his students, novel schemes for the security and cooperation in wireless networks; in particular, he has devised new techniques for key management, secure positioning, and incentives for cooperation in such networks. In 2003, he identified the security of vehicular networks as one of the main research challenges for real-world mobile ad hoc networks. Some of his current research activities revolve around privacy issues in mobile networks and are partially funded by Nokia.

He is co-founder and chairman of the steering committee of WiSec (the ACM Conference for Wireless Network Security). He has served on the program committees of numerous conferences and workshops, including SIGCOMM, INFOCOM, MobiCom, MobiHoc, SenSys, WiSe, and VANET. He is one of the seven commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission (ComCom), the "Swiss FCC". He held visiting positions at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and at UC Berkeley. He has been on the advisory board of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (T-Labs) since their creation in 2004. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Cryptographic protocols are a central technique for coordinating different principals in distributed systems that may contain malicious participants. In addition to basic uses such as key agreement, they may also be used to implement application-specific secure transactions.

We will present a sequence of example protocols, showing how more complex protocols may be built out of simpler units. An analysis method, called the strand space theory, offers proofs that protocols meet their security goals. Strand spaces have now been implemented in a software tool called a Cryptographic Protocol Shapes Analyzer (CPSA). CPSA also provides counterexamples when a protocol does not meet its security goals.

The strand space proofs are highly informative. In particular, they suggest protocol transformations -- in which more complex protocols are constructed from simpler ones -- that are guaranteed to preserve the security goals of the parts.