Biography:
Don Towsley holds a B.A. in Physics (1971) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1975) from University of Texas. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts in the Department of Computer Science. He has held visiting positions at numerous universities and research labs. He currently holds an adjunct faculty position with Xi’an Jiaotong University. His research interests include networks and performance evaluation.
He currently serves as a Co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computer Systems (TOMPECS) and served previously as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and on numerous editorial boards. He has served as Program Co-chair of several conferences including INFOCOM 2009.
He has received numerous awards including the 2007 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award, the 2008 ACM SIGCOMM Achievement Award, the 2011 IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award, and numerous paper awards including a 2008 ACM SIGCOMM Test-of-Time Paper Award and the 2012 ACM SIGMETRICS Test-of-Time Award. Last, he has been elected Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.
Title: Randomness and Privacy in Communications
Abstract: Security and privacy are fundamental concerns in today’s world. Recent revelations have shown that traditional cryptographic techniques do not provide the security that was expected. Moreover there are situations where even the presence of communications needs to be hidden and remain private; cryptographic techniques cannot provide such privacy. This has called into question how security and privacy can be provided. In this talk we investigate how randomness in the environment can be used to provide privacy in wireless communications. We consider the canonical problem where Alice wants to communicate with Bob in the presence of an adversary, Willie the Warden without Willie ever realizing that the communication is taking place. We consider a variety of wireless and wireline communication systems and determine how much information Alice can send privately to Bob without being detected. For example in wireless and optical communication systems, we establish that Alice can send O(√t) bits (and no more) to Bob in time t. On the other hand in a wireline channel where Alice can manipulate packet timings in order to encode information, Alice can convey much more information. Last, we report experimental results that corroborate these results.