[talks] Abhinav Narain (Georgia Institute of Technology) will present "Near-Field Deniable Communication" on Wednesday, May 24, 2017 in the CITP conference room, 3rd Fl, Sherrerd Hall at 11am

[Nicki Gotsis]

Abhinav Narain (Georgia Institute of Technology) will present his defense talk "Near-Field Deniable Communication" on Wednesday, May 24, 2017 in the CITP conference room, 3rd Fl, Sherrerd Hall  at 11am
(Webcast : http://bit.ly/2qFJXx6)

Title: Near-Field Deniable Communication
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Abhinav Narain
School of Computer Science
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology

Committee
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Prof. Nick Feamster (Adviser, School of Computer Science, Princeton University)
Prof. Mostafa Ammar, (School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology) 
Prof. Taesoo Kim, (School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology)
Prof. Alex Snoeren, (Dept. of Computer Science, University of California, San Diego)

Date:  Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Time:  11 am to 1 pm EST
Location: CITP conference room, third floor, Sherrerd Hall, Princeton University
Webcast : http://bit.ly/2qFJXx6

There is constant surveillance by employers, corporations, and governments.
Long people have wanted to keep their communication private but  With
increasing interest of state and private organizations and
corporations in the daily lives of people, such a discussion is on the
rise. This dissertation develops techniques and systems that empower
users to evade such intentions of adversaries. Our work builds from
the observation to leverage randomness in physical nature of the world
everywhere, specifically using technologies such as wireless and
power-lines networks in urban settings. This thesis is divided into
two parts. First part, we develop Denali, which allows deniable
communication in wireless 802.11 networks. Denali achieves this by
leveraging the weakness of wireless networks which has packet
corruption due to its ubiquitous nature of being broadcast
medium. This is the first such system which uses off-the-shelf
commodity hardware to users.


In the second part, we explore a different network primarily used for
powering devices in building infrastructure -- power-line network. We
build Power-line Whisperer, a physical layer covert communication
channel. Power-line Whisperer is the first of its kind of system to
make it easier for people to to do deniable communication on power-line
networks. Both these systems allow the users to do point-to-point
communication and defend against powerful adversaries who might be
interested in snooping on the message exchange for malicious reasons.