Research Activities

During my PhD in the RODEO project (now PLANETE) at INRIA-Sophia Antipolis, I studied the development of distributed applications within ALF (Application Level Framing) architecture. My research results are shown that it is possible to design and implement a communication system which takes into account constraints given by the application. They are led to an complet and automated development environment.

Since 1997, I joined the LORIA laboratory in the RESEDAS and then MADYNES project whose research domain is the management of dynamic aspects provided by networks and services. New organization models for networks and routing and as well as new services appear due to increasing dynamics within Internet: multicast services, peer-to-peer services, ad hoc and sensor networks. This is partly explained by the convergence of fix and mobile networks, of telecommunications and Internet worlds

My previous work related to ALF (Application Layer Framing) has firstly led me to investigate the active networks paradigm and, more specifically, the management of these active networks and the using of active networks for IPv6 protocols testing.

Then, I focused on a specific management service, i.e. the security service in the context of group communication. The multicast environment is an excellent application domain, which offers high of dynamics: every member may leave or join its group at every time. This involves frequent rekeying and leads to extensibility problems. Our research work has resulted in defining new key distribution protocols suitable for group communication.

With the deployment of wireless networks, the need for creating and interconnecting autonomous and spontaneous networks, so-called ad hoc networks, is increasing. Integrating multicast in such networks is important, in particular for military applications or public security operations where group communications are formed in order to exchange confidential data information. These applications are very sensitive and require a high level of security. In this context, I am working on how to adapt our group key management protocols to the ad hoc environment. We also propose a new key distribution approach in MANETs (Mobile Ad hoc NETworks) dedicated to secure flow multicast communications according to the sequential multi-source models.