Dear Members and Friends of CITRIS,
The end of the year is often a time to reflect and look back, but here at CITRIS our minds are on the future. What will the next big technological breakthroughs be and how can they be used to improve society?
This newsletter contains two forward-looking articles. "Sensor Networks and Beyond" surveys the innovative work CITRIS researchers are doing in the area of wireless sensor webs. It is my belief that this technology is on its way to becoming a significant part of the cyber-infrastructure of tomorrow. Just as much of the early work done on this technology has taken place at UC Berkeley, professors and talented students at all our campuses, joined by partners in industry and academia, are continuing to overcome hardware and software challenges and develop new applications and services for this revolutionary technology. Their work provides us with a glimpse at what's next for the field.
The subject of our second piece is very near to my heart. In an interview, I discuss my newly inaugurated Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST). Imagine a future when computer systems perform perfectly even while under attack by hackers and computer users will no longer have to fear mishandling of their private information. Those are exactly the kinds of dreams I believe TRUST will help make a reality.
During this busy season, we are especially grateful for your ongoing interest and support of CITRIS. As always, we look forward to receiving your feedback.
Professor Shankar Sastry
Director
Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society
Networked Embedded Systems: Sensor Networks and Beyond
From providing border surveillance to helping the elderly, how "smart dust" is going to revolutionize the future.
by Jenn Shreve
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Kris Pister explained his work on "smart dust" to Congressman Mike Honda at a meeting in March.
(Photo by Aaron Walburg)
When Kris Pister first started thinking about wireless sensor networks at a RAND workshop back in 1992, he didn’t imagine they would become a reality in just a matter of years. “It’s been really incredible to watch it grow from a decade ago, when it really was science fiction, to seeing it mature into an active research area and finally be commercialized. Now there are a whole bunch of companies doing this,” says Pister, an EECS professor at UC Berkeley who coined the phrase “smart dust” to describe individual sensor nodes.
Today, sensor networks are being used to monitor subtle environmental changes to California’s redwood canopy. They’ve replaced expensive and difficult-to-install power and temperature monitoring infrastructure in the Chicago Public Health Department. They’re even being developed to provide surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico border. As academic and laboratory research in the area flourishes, established and start-up companies alike are actively ramping up their research to meet industry’s needs. And this is just the beginning.
“The technology has tremendous applications. Many are still exploratory, but since so many universities and labs are pursuing them, eventually this is going to pick up in a big way,” says Ruzena Bajcsy, UC Berkeley EECS professor and CITRIS director emeritus.
Current CITRIS director Shankar Sastry predicts: “These network-embedded systems are going to be the infrastructure of tomorrow. They will be as much a part of our lives in the future as the Internet is today.”
CITRIS researchers are working on reductions in the size of microchips as well as how to power and network these devices.
(Image courtesy of Kris Pister)
A microscopic view of the same microchip.
(Image courtesy of Kris Pister)
To reach that point, a number of technical challenges still must be overcome. That’s why CITRIS researchers are engaged in projects ranging from strengthening the underlying hardware and software, so that it’s more reliable and secure, to developing new and revolutionary applications. What they’ve found is it’s often the very same attributes that make wireless sensor networks so convenient and flexible that also generate the obstacles between the current generation and future large scale deployments of networked embedded systems, that is systems embedded physically in our physical infrastructure.
For example, mobility and small size make wireless sensor networks cheap and easy to set up, but they also pose a security risk because the motes are more easily tampered with. Or take power. While the ever-shrinking mote doesn’t ask for much power to do all that sensing, processing, and transmitting, it does require some. Because it’s wireless, that means batteries. And batteries not only limit how small a node can be, but also require frequent replacement.
For the latter, progress is already being made. “With existing technology in industry, to get a 10-year lifetime out of nodes, you might need a D-cell or C-cell battery. With the next generation, you’ll be able to get a lifetime with a fat coin cell battery, and the generation after that it will be shrinking down,” says Pister. His student Ben Cook is publishing a paper at ISSCC (Intl. Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco) in February in which he demonstrates that he can operate a radio receiver in the same frequency band as WiFi but at 200 microwatts, about 100 times lower than the best commercially available radios used in wireless sensor networks. Meanwhile Berkeley professors Paul Wright (ME) and Jan Rabaey (EECS) have been working on energy-scavenging batteries, which use “ambient” sources of power, like floor and wall vibrations, to recharge.
Scalability is another concern. “The technology is still somewhat brittle so when you start doing large deployments problems with reliability and security arise,” says Sastry. He says the next generation of networks will need to have fewer false alarms, be more trustworthy, and, in addition to sensing, wield more control over the systems they monitor. For example a sensor monitoring the flow of oil in a pipeline might be able to automatically modify it when needed.
Sastry’s recently completed Network Embedded Systems Technology (NEST) project has produced an experimental platform on which researchers can test out their solutions to these types of problems. Similarly, the Dynamic Ad-Hoc Wireless Network (DAWN) research being spearheaded by UC Santa Cruz computer engineering professor J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves brings together scientists from seven leading universities to develop scalable, ad-hoc or peer-to-peer wireless networks, which could be used for communication in battlefields and emergency situations.
Driving all this innovation is the promise of new applications. As people dream up new ways to use sensor networks, they will adapt the technology to meet their needs. That, in turn, opens up new opportunities.
Bajcsy’s current work using sensors to monitor elderly people is a good example of this cycle. “We’ve been redesigning these sensors so that, in addition to the 3D accelerometers, they’ll have gyroscopes that can detect the posture of these people and hopefully—we don’t know yet—detect when they are losing balance so we could alert them when they are about to fall. We’re also interfacing it with a Bluetooth so it can make a call for help if indeed a fall does occur,” she says. Although her motivation for these modifications is very specific, it’s not difficult to imagine how these applications might be beneficial in very different scenarios.
“There’s going to be a real revolution when we solve the location problem,” says Pister. He’s referring to the fact that sensor networks have been successfully combined with GPS technologies to track movement, but GPS doesn’t work indoors. Hoping to solve this conundrum, graduate student Steven Lanzisera is developing a tool that would enable the nodes to calculate their own position to within three feet based on their proximity to other nodes in their network. Fire Information and Rescue Equipment (FIRE), a system designed by Berkeley mechanical engineering students that uses sensor networks to help firefighters safely navigate high rises, is already making use of similar technology.
Bajcsy is excited not only by the social impact that these new tools will have, but the economic and educational impacts as well. “We in computer science are worried about the decline of students coming into our departments. Well, this technology is much harder to outsource than software is. You can have these gadgets made abroad, but the installation and maintenance is local, so you will need the skills of engineers,” she says.
To help train the future workforce, CITRIS is launching a new Service Sciences Engineering and Management degree program that is inspired partially by the sensor web agenda. This program is expected to open its doors in Fall 2006. Meanwhile a number of start-up companies such as Pister’s Dust Networks, UC Berkeley computer science professor David Culler’s Arched Rock, and Moteiv, which was founded by three Berkeley engineering graduate students, are adapting the technology to make it easier for industry to use.
“What we in the universities had done was make it easy for other academics to build applications and do research in this area, but it wasn’t easy for companies to get in. What we set out to do at Dust Networks was to build a networking product that would be as easy to use as pushing the WiFi card into your laptop,” says Pister.
With every advancement and new contribution, the day when sensor webs become an integral part of life grows closer, though it's difficult to say just how they will be used. As Sastry points out: “With sensor webs there’s no single killer app, because with sensor webs there are thousands of killer apps."
For more information:
Overview of Sensor Networks, by David Culler, Deborah Estrin, and Mani Srivatstava (IEEE Computer Society, August 2004)
Dust Networks
Moteiv
Arched Rock
A Nest of Sensors, by David Pescovitz (Lab Notes, October/November 2005)
Robugs: Smart Dust Has Legs, by David Pescovitz (Lab Notes, September 2003)
Wireless Network uses "Smart Dust" Technology (SAIC Magazine)
Signal to Nodes, by Jenn Shreve (CITRIS Newsletter, October 2005)
Fahrenheit 20/20, by Jenn Shreve (CITRIS Newsletter, October 2005)
Nature’s Wet Labs, by Jenn Shreve (CITRIS Newsletter, June 2005)
Hey Earth, What's Shaking, by Jenn Shreve (CITRIS Newsletter, August 2005)
A Matter of TRUST
CITRIS director Shankar Sastry discusses how the newly inaugurated Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) is making society's computer infrastructure safer and more reliable.
by Jenn Shreve
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CITRIS Director Shankar Sastry will lead the newly dedicated Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology.
(photo by Aaron Walburg)
With computers running everything from financial institutions to oil, gas, and fuel pipelines to virtually all communications, the need for reliable, trustworthy systems is greater than ever. Yet with the introduction of each new application and platform, the opportunities for and frequency of sabotage have risen exponentially, creating a societal-scale Catch-22, in which our technological advantages have provided us greater functionality but have left us more vulnerable to attack.
Enter the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST). Led by UC Berkeley, TRUST brings together partners from industry and academia (see box for a complete list) in a well-coordinated research effort not only to address the technical and social aspects of cyber security but also ensure that information is rapidly transferred to those who need it. The National Science Foundation launched the center in April with a contract of $19 million in funding to be distributed over five years, with an option for another five years at roughly the same level of support. Formal dedication of the center took place on October 21.
In the following interview, CITRIS director Shankar Sastry, who will be leading TRUST, discusses some of the reasons why our systems are so insecure nowadays and the unique approaches TRUST is taking to make our computer infrastructure safer in the future.
It seems like a week doesn't go by without some new worm being unleashed or some new vulnerability being exposed. With all our firewalls, education, and other protections, why are our systems still so vulnerable?
Because they’re inadequate. The Internet and computers in general were developed for a smaller group of people, mostly scientists and engineers, who used it for their work. The culture of development of software and systems on the Internet has been one of putting in more features and adding more functionality, with a sense of it being a trusted place where people would all behave. But as the Internet has grown up and become an engine of supporting our daily life, the full spectrum of people who show up in society—including the criminal element, hack-activists, and disgruntled people—have been let into this infrastructure. As a result, the current infrastructure is simply unable to cope with the variety and number of attacks.
As this chart from a Carnegie Mellon University study highlights, with each new tool comes an increase in attacks.
(Source: Carnegie Mellon University)
(click to enlarge image)What can be done?
We can’t throw away the Internet and start over, so we have to fix it as we go. Doing that requires more than building firewalls and better cryptography. What’s needed is a whole system that features defense in depth, so that when you breach one layer of defenses there is another layer and then another. It has to address what you do when things are compromised, how you operate through attacks. At the same time, we have to bring back societal trust relationships, the notion of developing trust with people you communicate with, and then communicating more with them if you have greater trust with them.
How is TRUST different from other attempts to build more secure systems?
TRUST is ushering in the third generation of cyber security. The first generation focused on preventing attacks. The second worked on detecting intrusions and limiting damage. The third, and what TRUST is working on, is operating through attacks. Even if attacks do succeed, how do you keep critical infrastructures from going down? How do you think about network weather? How do you build systems that degrade gracefully? Our goal is to do a combination of research in these areas that gets transitioned into industry immediately. At the same time, we’ll be working on longer term solutions. That may involve more substantive rethinking, which would be harder for industry because they have such an investment in the status quo.
TRUST emphasizes developing new technologies. Do you have some examples?
Technology is obviously an important part of the cyber security agenda, but equally important is TRUST’s social-economic and privacy agendas. Even if we do all the most fantastic research in the world, if HP, Juniper, Cisco, and others don't put it in their routers and if Microsoft doesn’t use it in its secure products or its trusted computing systems, it would be completely irrelevant, because in some ways we are all exposed to even a few of these systems. So what we need to do is not only think about the technology, but the societal context, primarily the privacy.
For example, say you’ve got a service provider who says, “I’d like to keep you safe from attack, but to do so I need to know everything you’re doing on your computer.” The issue there, of course, is privacy more than technology. Maybe you trust the service provider enough to let them in to do it, but maybe they’re cashing it and using it to troll for trends in what you do. That would be objectionable. They might say we need to do that if you want to protect everyone else that is using our services. The question is where do you draw the boundary between left alone and the common good.
Carnegie Mellon University
Cornell University
Mills College
San Jose State University
Smith College
Stanford University
University of California, Berkeley
Vanderbilt University
Bellsouth
British Telecom
Cisco Systems
ESCHER (Boeing, Lockheed Martin,
Ford, GM, Raytheon)
Hewlett Packard
Infineon
IBM
Intel
Microsoft
Pirelli
Qualcomm
Sun
Symantec
Oak Ridge.
How will the ideas and solutions that come out of TRUST be tested and shared?
We have a number of test beds. We’ve built a 1/64th replica of the Internet, which is going to be used to test wireless and worm defenses. And there are other test beds which address vulnerabilities in physical infrastructures, like monitoring devices for oil and gas pipelines and electrical power grids. The NEST test bed for wireless sensor networks is another example.
TRUST has received major funding from the National Science Foundation and industry partners, and is working in tandem with several other academic institutions. Why is it important for us all to work together?
It’s important to work together because the problems are too big for any one university or any sector of industry to do by itself. Also, it won’t matter if we fix it at University of California, Berkeley, because the problems are really at the societal scale.
How does TRUST fit in with the larger aims of CITRIS?
The reason that TRUST is such an integral part of CITRIS is because CITRIS is about information technology and societal systems. If we are going to trust information technology to be the bricks and mortar of our infrastructure, it has to contain within it everything we know about society, which are trust relationships. And until we get that, it’ll be a brittle infrastructure. So it’s absolutely critical to me, it’s one of the most critical parts about getting IT into our infrastructures.
For more information:
TRUST’s Web site
“2 professors go fishing for phishers” by Carrie Kirby (San Francisco Chronicle, July 25, 2005)
“Campus to Direct New Research Center” by Cristina Bautista (Daily Cal, April 14, 2005)
“U.S. Grant Offered to Team Studying Computer Attacks” by David Bank (Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2005)
“A Nest of Sensors” by David Pescovitz (Lab Notes, Oct/Nov 2005)
Network Embedded Systems Technology Web site
12.07.05
