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, Princeton University) Prof. Wenke Lee (School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology)

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, June 22, 2016

Time:  1 pm to 3 pm EST

Location: CITP conference room, Sherard Hall, Princeton University Webcast : http://bit.ly/28JKsKd

Abstract:

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There is constant surveillance by employers, corporations, and governments.

People need to communicate with one another while concealing the communication itself. The existing system provides few tools in Wide-area Internet, but parties in close physical proximity may want to use a lightweight tool. Although tools for encrypted communication exist, they serve only to single out privacy-minded individuals as compared to eavesdroppers.

First, the thesis proposes a deniable communication system, Denali. The system leverages an observation of leveraging ubiquitous phenomenon of packet corruption in Wireless networks. The system uses off-the-shelf hardware to provide ease of use for the users.

Second, I present deniable communication system for power-line networks called Power-line Whisperer. The system leverages the presence of physical layer noise in power-line network. The system uses software defined radios to evaluate and demonstrate a novel technique to hide transmissions in noise.

Finally, instead of using computations on a processor to generate signals on the channel, I propose to sense electromagnetic interference on power-line to detect the presence of anomalous activity on processors in IoT devices.