Securing Emerging Short Range Wireless Communications

Short-range wireless communication technologies have been used in many security-sensitive smartphone applications and services such as contactless micro payment and device pairing. In this talk, we present two novel secure short-range communication systems — SBVLC and PriWhisper. The first system, SBVLC is a secure system for barcode-based visible light communication between smartphones. As an alternative to NFC technology, 2D barcodes have been increasingly used for security-sensitive applications including payments and personal identification. However, the security of barcode-based communication in mobile applications has not been systematically studied. Due to the visual nature, 2D barcodes are subject to eavesdropping when they are displayed on the screen of a smartphone. We formally analyze the security of SBVLC based on geometric models and then propose two secure data exchange schemes. The second system, PriWhisper is a keyless secure acoustic short-range communication system tailored for smartphones. It is designed to provide a software-based solution to secure mobile communication without pre-sharing secret keys. PriWhisper explores the friendly jamming technique from radio communication for data confidentiality. The security of our proposed acoustic is analytically analyzed in terms of (in)separability of the data and jamming signals against blind signal segmentation attacks. We also demonstrate AcousAuth — a novel smartphone empowered mobile application for personal authentication, built on top of PriWhisper.

Biography

Kui Ren is an associate professor of computer science and engineering at State University of New York at Buffalo. In the past, he has been with Illinois Institute of Technology. He received his PhD degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and BS and MS degrees from Zhejiang University. Kui’s research interests include Cloud Security, Wireless & Network Security, and Mobile Crowdsourcing Systems. His research has been supported by NSF, DoE, AFRL, and Amazon. He is a recipient of NSF CAREER Award in 2011 and Sigma Xi/IIT Research Excellence Award in 2012. Kui also received the Best Paper Award of IEEE ICNP 2011. Kui serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Wireless Communications, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, and Journal of Communications and Networks. Kui is also a TPC area chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2015. Kui is a senior member of IEEE, a member of ACM, and a past board member of Internet Privacy Task Force of Illinois.

Event Topic

Data Science