CT-ISG: Secure Localization: An Education and Research Joint Approach

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

To motivate undergraduate students for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of communication, cryptography, wireless networking, and embedded systems, we introduced a course called Secure Wireless Robots on Mission (SWARM). SWARM is laboratory-focused with the goal of designing, and building rescue-mission oriented heterogeneous wireless systems, operating in adversarial environments. It integrates a team-based competition as a pedagogical tool to motivate and challenge the students. It uses state of the art technologies such as multi-hop sensor networks, cell phones programming, Bluetooth communication, and basic robotics. Teams are allowed to use any denial of service attack (e.g., jamming, replaying). We propose to expand SWARM into a sequence of two courses SWARM I, and SWARM II and open it to both CS/EE undergraduate and graduate students. The students will be required to form mixed teams. SWARM I will deal with building the hardware platform for the embedded wireless communication and robot control, and the software libraries for secure communication and control. SWARM II will focus on developing a multi-hop control and communication system with robustness against adversarial attacks. We aim at extending the SWARM pedagogical approach, to attract and to prepare a future workforce in cyber security by providing them a controlled environment to explore and to test new research results. We intend to transfer our research results and technologies to the classrooms, to stimulate students? interest, and to obtain feedback from classroom activities. We will also develop materials such as hardware prototypes and software libraries to be shared with the education community.