June 3, Panagiotis Papadimitratos, KTH

Friday, June 3 , 2016, 11am – 12 pm
15 St. Mary’s Street, Room 105
Refreshments at 2:45 pm

Panagiotis Papadimitratos
KTH

Secure Communication in Wireless Networks 

Wireless devices are becoming ubiquitous, often embedded in physical spaces. Public safety networks, sensor networks, industrial control networks, vehicular networks, they can all offer new services based on communication across multiple wireless hops. Such networks can be ephemeral, volatile, and dense, as well as necessitate self-organization. The nature of these (entirely or partly) ad hoc networks requires a fundamental rethinking of security. At the same time, effective solutions need to remain efficient as the network size grows. In this seminar, we discuss secure and fault tolerant communication in wireless ad hoc networks. We first consider solutions that leverage cryptographic primitives and show how to secure fundamental networking building blocks: secure neighborhood discovery, secure route discovery, and secure data communication. We also briefly discuss how to formalize and rigorously argue about security properties. Then, we transition to a more abstract and information-theoretic view of the system. We consider first the achievable rate of secure and reliable communication in the presence of active modification attacks. Then, we discuss fundamental limits for secure (secret/confidential) communication, showing how zero-cost secure communication could be achieved.

Panagiotis (Panos) Papadimitratos earned his Ph.D. degree from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 2005. He then held positions at Virginia Tech, EPFL and Politecnico of Torino. Panos is currently an Associate Professor at KTH, where he leads the Networked Systems Security group. His research agenda includes a gamut of security and privacy problems, with emphasis on wireless networks. Group web page: www.ee.kth.se/nss.

Faculty Host: Yannis Paschalidis