The goal of this project is to develop a new approach to the everlasting protection of information from interception by adversaries in wireless communication networks, with a focus on the scenario where an eavesdropper obtains a higher-quality version of the transmitted signal than the desired recipient. In particular, information-theoretic secrecy can provide everlasting secrecy without the assumptions on the future computational capabilities of the eavesdroppers required in standard cryptography, but information-theoretic secrecy requires assumptions on the network topology. These assumptions have often been cited as "showstoppers" for the employment of information-theoretic secrecy. By exploiting imperfections in the receiver hardware of eavesdroppers, our goal is to provide information theoretic (and hence everlasting) secrecy regardless of the locations of eavesdroppers and system nodes.
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants CIF-1249275 and CIF-1421957. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
In addition to the research below, we are active in undergraduate education and K-12 outreach . Recently, Prof. Goeckel advised a senior capstone project that developed an intuitive 3-D modeling interface at both the input and output; most notable is an output that is a true 3-D hologram. Prof. Goeckel and the team have begun to take the "hologram machine" on the road, visiting a local elementary school on May 8th, 2014 to engage young students in math and science. You can read a bit about the project here , and see a video of the project here .
We recently gave a two-hour invited tutorial lecture at the 2014 International Conference on Networking and Communications (ICNC 2014) that highlighted the challenges of everlasting security in wireless communications and methods to seek it . The slides are available here:
A (very short) related tutorial paper was invited for the 2014 URSI General Assembly:The original for attacking the receiver hardware to obtain everlasting secrecy, and a simple power modulation instantiation of it, was presented in:
The power modulation scheme listed above is susceptible to a sophisticated eavesdropper, in particular on with multiple receiver chains with different gains. This has motivated us to consider different methods to thwart the sophisticated eavesdropper: (1) by inducing an intentional intersymbol interference (ISI) channel, for which Bob has an advantage in equalization (ISIT 2013), or (2) employing an added jamming signal at the transmitter, for which Bob has an advantage in cancellation (Asilomar 2014 and IEEE TWireless). We also have considered the utilization of the jamming technique in wireless networks to solve the difficult (and important) "near eavesdropper" problem (IEEE TWireless):
We are also interested in understanding the jamming game that dominates wideband adversarial communications: both as an impediment and as a tool to reduce the dynamic range of eavesdroppers. Towards this end, we have started to study communication in the present of active jammers:
We have also introduced in privacy an analog to information-theoretic security; in particular, we define an information theoretic notion of Perfect Location Privacy. In the proposed framework, we employ anonymization and/or obfuscation as our location privacy protection mechanism to hide the identity of users over time. We assume the strongest adversary, i.e., we assume that the adversary has complete statistical knowledge of the users' movements, is observing the anonymized users and her goal is to de-anonymize the location data, and consider the number of observations required by an adversary to break a user's privacy in the limit of a large number of users (CISS 2016, ISIT 2017, IEEE TIFS). In addition, motivated by this work which suggests a trace ``matching game'' is the key to privacy when considering many location privacy applications, we have also started to consider a fundamental investigation of this problem in the non-asymptotic regime (Asilomar 2017).
We have sought to employ the techniques of this project to determine whether a signal has been recorded and then replayed. This will have an impact on radar spoofing, where an enemy records the signal, delays it, and then plays it back to fool the radar about the range, or in standard replay attacks in security. Our method is to detect the recording and replay by detecting small nonlinearities inherently involved in that process.