Measuring energy-security tradeoffs in wireless networks

In recent years, several researchers have studied the vulnerabilities present in the security protocols associated with 802.11-based wireless networks. This research has led to the creation of protocol extensions such as 802.1X. Simultaneously, researchers studying the limitations of wireless networks have turned their attention to an inherent limitations of wireless devices, namely, limited battery power life. Research in this area has mostly focused on understanding and minimizing the power expended by the wireless network interface card. Unfortunately, most of this work has not considered the significant energy implications of security threats and/or the energy overhead that various proposed wireless security protocols incur. The work presented here is an attempt to address this important limitation. Our contribution is create a decision-theoretic model that can be used to understand such tradeoffs. Finally, we used this framework to analyze the security-reliability tradeoffs present in today's most popular security protocol such as WEP, WPA, and Counter CBC-MAC.