Wireless Networks That Build Themselves

ScienceDaily has an interesting article that looks at ad-hoc wireless networks and how they might be even more useful on a large scale. The RUNES project is featured as an example of software projects that might be able to make mobile devices that form self-organizing wireless networks to help promote this goal. "RUNES set out to create middleware: software that bridges the gap between the operating systems used by the mobile sensor nodes, and high-level applications that make use of data from the sensors. RUNES middleware is modular and flexible, allowing programmers to create applications without having to know much about the detailed working of the network devices supplying the data. This also makes it easy to incorporate new kinds of mobile device, and to re-use applications."

RUNES Homepage

[sconeu]

Runes Homepage [ist-runes.org] for those who want more depth.

Re:Recipe for Cash

[mrogers]

If only SSL had been designed to make man-in-the-middle attacks impossible. Oh wait, it was! Your browser contains root certificates that are used to verify that your bank's certificate hasn't been replaced or modified by an attacker. MITM attack against SSH? Maybe, if you don't check the key fingerprint (and I doubt anyone does). MITM attack against SSL? No chance, unless the server has a self-signed certificate, something no bank would consider.

What a Wireless Sensor Node is:

[corsec67]

A wireless sensor node like the Tmote Sky [sentilla.com](pdf) is a very tiny embedded computer that runs on 2 AA batteries, and is usually the size of the back of the 2 AA battery holder. They have a radio on it, but the radio isn't compatible with 802.11b instead compatible with 802.15.4 [wikipedia.org], and is limited to about 256kbps. The Tmote Sky has a 8MHz 8-bit processor (the Atmega 128), 10KiB of ram, 1024KiB of flash, with a few A-D inputs and some digital outputs. It isn't exactly very fast, nor does it have a bunch of ram.

It is designed for a distributed sensor platform, and not doing a lot of computation.

A picture of one is here [flickr.com], connected to a 14-foot USB cable.