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Chapin, Peter C.

Computer Science

2014

Ph. D.

Many embedded systems, such as wireless sensor networks, make use of highly resource constrained devices. Security goals for such systems tend to focus on keeping data confidential from outsiders or ensuring data integrity during communication. However as embedded systems from different administrative domains increasingly come into contact, for example via short hop radio links, a need arises for one system to allow partial access to its resources from adjoining systems. This dissertation explores two approaches for providing distributed trust management facilities to resource constrained embedded systems, in particular wireless sensor networks. The first is a direct approach using a secure remote procedure call mechanism called SpartanRPC. The second is a staged approach using a two stage programming system called Scalaness/nesT. In addition to describing these two approaches this dissertation also presents the results of evaluating them both in test environments and with a realistic application. Both approaches are feasible but the staged approach is far more flexible and, depending on application requirements, more efficient.