
Professor Ian Brown
Former Research Fellow
Professor Ian Brown was Professor of Information Security and Privacy at the OII. His research is focused on surveillance, privacy-enhancing technologies, and Internet regulation.
Wireless sensor networks are more and more seen as a solution to large-scale tracking and monitoring applications. The deployment and management of these networks, however, is handled by a central controlling entity and the sensor network is often dedicated to a single application. We argue that this is due to the fact that we do not yet have the means to deal with a secure multi-purpose federated sensor network, running different applications in parallel and able to reconfigure dynamically to run others.
The communication paradigms which have been usually devised for small and single owner sensor networks simply do not have the right scalability, security, reconfigurability characteristics required for this environment.
The Federated Secure Sensor Network Laboratory (FRESNEL) aims to build a large scale federated sensor network framework with multiple applications sharing the same resources. We want to guarantee a reliable intra-application communication as well as a scalable and distributed management infrastructure. Orthogonally, privacy and application security should also be maintained.
We evaluate our proposal though a large scale federation of sensor networks over the Cambridge campus. The sensors monitor different aspects (temperature, pollution, movement, etc) and the network will be running various applications belonging to different authorities in the city.
The overall aim of the project is to provide a federated sensor network platform that could be used by multiple applications in a seamless and secure manner. To achieve this aim, we have set the following technical objectives:
This project is a collaboration between the Computer Laboratory (University of Cambridge), the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), and the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (ComLab).
Former Research Fellow
Professor Ian Brown was Professor of Information Security and Privacy at the OII. His research is focused on surveillance, privacy-enhancing technologies, and Internet regulation.
Senior Research Fellow
Joss Wright's research interests lie in information controls, privacy-enhancing technologies, and cyber-enabled crime. His current research focuses on measuring internet censorship, and uncovering the online illegal wildlife trade.
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford