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, 2016

Time:  9 am to 11 am EST

Location: CITP conference room, Sherard 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.