Dissertation in the field of security networking technology, Philip Ginzboorg, M.Sc.

Philip Ginzboorg's dissertation takes place in Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering on Tuesday 27 May 2014 at 13 noon. The title of the thesis is "Security mechanisms in partially isolated networks".

The dissertation is about securing data communication between mobile devices with little or no support from infrastructure. We study security and privacy, as well as resource management, in networks subject to difficult operational constraints, like disrupted links and high delays. Specifics of such networks are the consequence of intermittent access to (or complete lack of) infrastructure and partial isolation of the network nodes from each other.  Partial isolation of the nodes aggravates resource scarcity.  Our thesis is that in partially isolated networks security and privacy, on the one hand, and resource management, on the other, are closely related and tend to influence each other.

This dissertation includes nine publications. Their summaries are grouped in two chapters.  The first is about security and privacy issues and also the question of congested buffer management, which we approach via adversarial scenario. In the second we consider better utilization of the scarce contact time between the network nodes via message fragmentation when there are intermittent transmission opportunities.

Part of the work comprising this dissertation had industrial impact: The author has contributed to the Generic Authentication Architecture standard of 3GPP, and one of our buffer-management techniques was included of the Nokia Awarenet platform.

The opponent is Professor Gene Tsudik from the University of California, Irvine, and the supervisor is Professor Jörg Ott from Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Communications and Networking.

More information

Notice of dissertation defence (pdf)

Electronic dissertation thesis (otalib.aalto.fi)