Speaker: Prof. Dr. Jens Schmidt
Title: Why Play Fairer than the Attacker?

Abstract: 
Security in wireless networks is a notorious problem, suffering from the following dilemma: On the one hand the wireless medium access puts the attacker into a much better position, on the other hand wireless devices most often have resource deficiencies (processing, memory, energy) which make strong attack countermeasures based on cryptographic solutions impossible. Though, there have been many approaches towards lightweight security for wireless networks, this dilemma always persists, at least for the low-cost sector, say, for example, sensor networks or RFIDs. 

So far the overwhelming majority of wireless security approaches followed a conventional security paradigm which abstracts the physical communication as a logical channel. We depart from this paradigm, and try to leverage from the physical characteristics of wireless communications as much as possible, thus bringing us again in equality of arms with the attacker. This we coined the security by wireless principle.

In the talk, several incarnations of the security by wireless principle are presented. These are taken from WLAN as well as wireless sensor network scenarios and show for different security goals that security by wireless designs can lead to interesting security solutions.

Speaker's short biography:
Jens Schmidt is a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Kaiserslautern where he heads the Distributed Computer Systems Laboratory (DISCO). Previously, he was research group leader of the Multimedia Distribution & Networking group in the Multimedia Communications Laboratory (KOM) at Darmstadt University of Technology. His current research interests lie in the performance modeling and control of complex distributed systems and wireless sensor networks, QoS provisioning, resource management and security in wireless networks. Prof. Jens Schmidt received his Diploma's degree from the University of Mannheim in joint business and computer sciences in 1996. In 1994, during a stay at the University of Wales, Swansea, he also did a European M.B.S. degree. In 2000 he received his Ph.D. degree (Dr.-Ing.) from Darmstadt University of Technology.