I am currently interested in Wireless Sensor Network research, specifically in “Participatory” Sensor Networks. This is an exciting new paradigm where people voluntarily collect information from their local environment using personal devices like mobile phones and then share this information using existing communication infrastructure (like the cellular network). Voluntary participation coupled with the use of personal mobile devices as sensors, opens up a whole new world of possibilities where it becomes easy for anyone to help in better understanding their environment. It would be like taking citizen science to the next level. However, this also makes it easy for anyone to abuse the system: such as deliberately sharing incorrect information.
My interest lies mainly in developing secure protocols specific to the needs of participatory sensing applications. The goal is to prevent or identify any fabrication of the data collected and hold the culprits accountable while protecting the privacy of honest participants.
We use a unique trusted-platform based approach to simplify the required security solutions and provide irrefutable guarantees about the integrity of the collected data.
Publications
Paper. Sam Moffatt, Akshay Dua, Wu-chang Feng, ”SpotCheck: An Efficient Defense Against Information Exposure Cheats“, in Proceedings of NetGames, October 2011.
Paper. Akshay Dua, Nirupama Bulusu, Wu-chang Feng, ”Privacy-preserving Online Mixing of High Integrity Mobile Multi-user Data“, in Proceedings of SecureComm, September 2011.
Paper. Akshay Dua, Nirupama Bulusu, Wu-chang Feng, “Catching Cheats with Interactive Proofs: Privacy-preserving Crowd-sourced Data Collection Without Compromising Integrity,” In Proceedings of PhoneSense, Nov 2010 (presentation)
Paper. Akshay Dua, Nirupama Bulusu, Wen Hu, Wu-chang Feng, “Towards Trustworthy Participatory Sensing,” In Proceedings of USENIX HotSec, August 2009 (presentation)
Demo. Akshay Dua, Wen Hu, Nirupama Bulusu, “A Trusted Platform Based Framework for Participatory Sensing,” In Proceedings of IPSN, April 2009 (poster)
Demo. Damon Tyman, Akshay Dua, Jens Mache, Nirupama Bulusu, “Contour Tracking: A Comprehensive Student Project for Sensor Network Education,” In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM, August 2008
Invited Talks
Guest Speaker. “Finding IRC-like Meshes Sans Layer 7 Payloads” at Lockdown 2009, Madison, WI
Guest Panelist. “Can We Trust the Sensor?” at HotMobile 2010, Annapolis, Maryland
Guest Speaker. “Towards Trustworthy Participatory Sensing” at Lewis & Clark College, Portalnd, OR
Technical Reports and Informal Presentations
Technical Report. Akshay Dua, Jim Binkley, and Suresh Singh, “Finding IRC-Like Meshes Sans L7 Payloads,” PSU TR 2009-01 (More detailed version: paper; presentation)
Presentation. GAnGS: Gather, Authenticate ’n Group Securely, Chen et al.
Presentation. AnonySense: Privacy-Aware People-Centric Sensing, Cornelius et al.
Presentation. The Resurrecting Duckling, Frank Stajano and Ross Anderson
Presentation. Toward Community Sensing, Krause et al.