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Abstract for Seminar
Encrypted protocols, such as SSL, are becoming more prevalent because of the growing use of e-commerce, anonymity services, and secure authentication. Likewise, traffic analysis is becoming more common because it is often the only way to analyze these protocols. Though there are many valid uses for traffic analysis (such as network policy enforcement and intrusion detection), it can also be used to maliciously compromise the secrecy or privacy of a user. While the payload can be strongly protected by encryption, analysis of traffic patterns can yield information about the type and nature of traffic. We are exploring the use of synthetically generated "cover traffic" in which real traffic is embedded. Perfect preservation of privacy is achieved if the cover traffic behavior is completely independent of real traffic, and yet a high price in average increased delay is experienced. Tradeoffs exist between privacy (measured in terms of entropy of probability distributions of real traffic behavior) and performance (measured in terms of average latency). This talk describes the problem and presents algorithms we've developed for managing this tradeoff.
David Nicol is Director of the Information Trust Institute, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a B.A. in mathematics from Carleton College in 1979, and the MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Virginia, the latter in 1985. Before joining UIUC in 2003, he was a faculty member at the College of William and Mary, and Dartmouth College, where he served as department chair, and helped to establish the Institute for Security Technology Studies. Professor Nicol's interests lie in high performance computing, simulation and modeling, and trustworthy computing. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE and also Fellow of the ACM for his research contributions, and was the inaugural recipient of the ACM SigSIM "Distinguished Contributions" Award.