Wenyuan Xu      徐文渊

 

Assistant Professor

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

University of South Carolina

315 Main St.
Columbia, SC 29208

 

Associate Faculty

Environment and Sustainability Program

 

 Office: 3A61 Swearingen Email: wyxucse.sc.edu Phone: +1-803-777-6853 Fax: +1-803-777-3767

Mailing address:
Dept. of CSE
315 Main St.
Columbia, SC 29208   

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Research News

 
Channel-Aware Biomimetic Sensor Networks for Intertidal Zones
We are designing channel-aware sensor networks that can survive the harsh radio environment in intertidal zones.  Our first deployment in the Oregon intertidal zones has been covered in local news.
Wireless Privacy and Security of TPMS
Our research on Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) of modern automobiles is mentioned in an article in Communications of the ACM (November 2011), "Hacking Cars", and has received wide press coverage in more than 50 media outlets, including a segment on CNN, web stories in the MIT Technology Review, etc.

Research

My research interests are  wireless networking, and its security and privacy. I have a particular interest in building reliable wireless networks and securing commodity wireless devices.

Current Projects

 Channel-Aware Biomimetic Sensor Networks for Intertidal Zones. The intertidal zone – the region between the low and high tide lines along the coasts of the world’s oceans – serves as a key test bed for exploring the effects of global climate change on species distributions and abundances. We are designing and deploying wireless “biomimetic” sensor networks (WSN) that monitor environmental parameters pertaining to climate change impacts (e.g., temperature). Monitoring the intertidal zone using WSNs remains challenging, because periodic changes in sea level cause communication channel quality to oscillate and make the intertidal zone an unstable environment for radio communication. The wireless sensor networks have to self-diagnose the communication capability and adapt network protocols accordingly.
 

Securing In-Car Sensor Networks. Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) monitor air pressure inside tires and trigger dashboard warnings wirelessly if a tire's pressure drops. Through our reverse-engineering effort, we have shown that TPMS wireless transmissions lack security protection common in basic computer networking, such as input validation, data encryption, or authentication. TPMS wireless signals can be intercepted 40 meters away using a simple receiver, which makes it feasible to track drivers' locations . We also demonstrated that a transmitter that  "spoofs" the sensor signal can easily send false readings and trigger a car's dashboard warning display. We are working on hardware and software solutions to secure TPMS and other in-car sensor networks.
 

Security and Privacy Study of AMR meters. To understand the security and privacy implication of automatic meter reading (AMR), we are analyzing existing residential AMR meters, including electricity and gas meters.  The privacy issues associated with smart meters have attracted much attention; what has not attracted attention (but is already deployed widely) is AMR systems. AMR meters allow one-way wireless communication from meters to utility “drive-by” receivers, and share similar characteristics with smart meters, which enable two-way wireless communication between meters and utility companies.
 

Anti-jamming. Wireless networks are susceptible to simple forms of jamming attacks and unintentional radio interference that can prevent other wireless devices from being able to transmit or receive. We are working on jamming-resistant protocols on the network and application layer, and on strategies to identify the physical location of one or multiple jammers.

 

News

Teaching

About me

I received my Ph.D in computer engineering from the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) of Rutgers University. I hold a MS degree in computer science and engineering from Zhejiang University and a BS degree in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University, China.

Publications

Book
 

Yingying Chen, Wenyuan Xu, Wade Trappe  and Yanyong Zhang, 
Securing Emerging Wireless Systems, 
ISBN: 978-0-387-88490-5, Springer, 200

Journal Papers

  1. Zhenhua Liu and Wenyuan Xu, "Determining Sink Location through Zeroing-In Attackers in Wireless Sensor Networks," to appear in Wireless Networts.

  2. Zhenhua Liu, Hongbo Liu, Wenyuan Xu, and Yingying Chen, "Exploiting Jamming-Caused Neighbor Changes for Jammer Localization," to appear in IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems(TPDS).  

  3. Hongbo Liu, Zhenhua Liu, Yingying Chen, and Wenyuan Xu, "Determining the Position of a Jammer Using a Virtual-Force Iterative Approach," in Wireless Networks, Volume 17, Number 2, 531-547, 2011.

  4. Pandurang Kamat, Wenyuan Xu, Yanyong Zhang, and Wade Trappe, "Temporal Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks: Theory and Practice," in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), Volume 5, Issue 4, 2009. 

  5. Wenyuan Xu, Wade Trappe, and nd Yanyong Zhang, "Defending Wireless Sensor Networks from Radio Interference through Channel Adaptation,"  ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), Volume 4, Issue 4, August 2008.

  6. Wenyuan Xu, Ke Ma, Wade Trappe, and Yanyong Zhang, "Jamming Sensor Networks: Attack and Defense Strategies," IEEE Networks Special Issue on Sensor Networks, Vol.20, No. 3, pg. 41-47, May/June 2006. (Acceptance ratio: 10.3%)

Conference Papers

  1. Miao Xu, Wenyuan Xu, and Jason M. O'Kane, "Content-Aware Data Dissemination for Enhancing Privacy and Availability in Wireless Sensor Networks,"  in Proceedings of  8th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (IEEE MASS), 2011

  2. Hossen Mustafa, Xin Zhang, Zhenhua Liu, Wenyuan Xu, and Adrian Perrig, "Short Paper: Jamming-Resilient Multipath Routing Leveraging Availability-Based Correlation," in Proceedings of WiSec 2011

  3. Hongbo Liu, Zhenhua Liu, Yingying Chen, and Wenyuan Xu, "Localizing Multiple Jamming Attackers in Wireless Networks,"in Proceedings of Int'l Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2011 

  4. Ishtiaq Rouf, Rob Miller, Hossen Mustafa, Travis Taylor, Sangho Oh, Wenyuan Xu, Marco Gruteser, Wade Trappe, and Ivan Seskar , "Security and Privacy Vulnerabilities of In-Car Wireless Networks: A Tire Pressure Monitoring System Case Study," in Proceedings of the 19th USENIX Security Symposium, Washington DC, August 11-13, 2010 [Talk slides]  [Talk video]

  5. Jian Hou, Zhiyun Lin, Wenyuan Xu, and Gangfeng Yan, "Distributed Transmit Beamforming with Autonomous and Self-organizing Mobile Antennas," in Proceedings of IEEE GLOBECOM 2010

  6. Jason M. O'Kane and Wenyuan Xu, "Network-Assisted Target Tracking Via Smart Local Routing," in Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2010

  7. Zhenhua Liu, Hongbo Liu, Wenyuan Xu, and Yingying Chen, "Wireless Jamming Localization by Exploiting Nodes' Hearing Ranges," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor System (DCOSS), Santa Barbara, CA, June 2010

  8. Zhenhua Liu and Wenyuan Xu, "Zeroing-In on Network Metric Minima for Sink Location Determination," in Proceedings of ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec), 2010.  (Acceptance ratio: 21%)

  9. Jason M. O'Kane  and Wenyuan Xu, "Energy-efficient Target Tracking with a Sensorless Robot and a Network of Unreliable One-bit Priximity Sensors," in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2009.  

  10. Hongbo Liu, Wenyuan Xu, Yingying Chen and Zhenhua Liu, "Localizing Jammers in Wireless Networks," in Proceedings of IEEE PerCom International Workshop on Pervasive Wireless Networking (IEEE PWN) (Held in conjunction with IEEE PerCom), Texas, March 2009.

  11. Wenyuan Xu, Wade Trappe and Yanyong Zhang, " Anti-Jamming Timing Channels for Wireless Networks ," in proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Wireless Security (WiSec), pg. 203-213, 2008. (Acceptance ratio: 16.7%)

  12. Wenyuan Xu, " On Adjusting Power to Defend Wireless Networks from Jamming," in proceedings of the First Workshop on the Security and Privacy of Emerging Ubiquitous Communication Systems (speucs), 2007.

  13. Pandurang Kamat, Wenyuan Xu, Yanyong Zhang and Wade Trappe, "Temporal Privacy in wireless sensor networks," in Proceedings of 27th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2007), pg. 23, 2007. (Acceptance ratio: 13.5%)

  14. Rob Miller, Wenyuan Xu, Pandurang Kamat, and Wade Trappe, "Service Discovery and Device Identification in Cognitive Radio Networks," in Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Networking Technologies for Software Defined Radio (SDR) Networks (Held in Conjunction with IEEE SECON) 2007.

  15. Wenyuan Xu, Wade Trappe, and Yanyong Zhang, "Channel Surfing: Defending Wireless Sensor Networks from Jamming and Interference," in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN07), pg.499-508,2007. (Acceptance ratio: 15.3%)

  16. Wenyuan Xu, Wade Trappe, and Yanyong Zhang, " Poster Abstract: Channel Surfing: Defending Wireless Sensor Networks from Jamming and Interference , " in Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), pg. 403-404, 2006. 

  17. Zang Li, Wenyuan Xu, Rob Miller, and Wade Trappe, " Securing Wireless Systems via Lower Layer Enforcements," in Proceedings of the 2006 ACM workshop on Wireless security (WiSe), pg. 33-42, 2006. (Acceptance ratio: 19.6%)

  18. Wenyuan Xu, Pandurang Kamat, and Wade Trappe, " TRIESTE: A Trusted Radio Infrastructure for Enforcing SpecTrum Etiquettes, " in Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Networking Technologies for Software Defined Radio (SDR) Networks (Held in Conjunction with IEEE SECON) 2006.

  19. Wenyuan Xu, Wade Trappe, Yanyong Zhang, and Timothy Wood, "The Feasibility of Launching and Detecting Jamming Attacks in Wireless Networks, " in Proceedings of ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (Mobihoc), pg. 46-57,2005. (Acceptance ratio: 14.2%)

  20. Wenyuan Xu, Timothy Wood, Wade Trappe, and Yanyong Zhang, "Channel Surfing and Spatial Retreats: Defenses Against Wireless Denial of Service, " in Proceedings of the 2004 ACM workshop on Wireless security (WiSe), pg. 80 - 89, 2004. (Acceptance ratio: 20%)

  21. Wenyuan Xu, Wade Trappe, and Sanjoy Paul, "Key Management for 3G MBMS Security, " in Proceeding of IEEE Global Communications Conference(GLOBECOM), Dallas, TX, Nov. 2004

Last updated: Sun Dec 12 2011 [validate xhtml]