DATE/TIME:  30 may 2016, 16.00-17.00

LOCATION:   Dip. Ing. Informazione, A.Inform.1, largo Lucio Lazzarino,PISA

SPEAKER:    Prof. Hakim Weatherspoon, Cornell Univ., USA

TITLE:      "Chupja--PHY Covert Channels: Can you see the Idles?"

Abstract:

Network covert timing channels embed secret messages in legitimate
packets by modulating interpacket delays. Such channels are normally
implemented in higher network layers (layer 3 or above), are often
fairly slow, and can be easily detected or prevented. In this talk, I
will present a new approach, Chupja (Korean for spy), which is a very
effective covert timing channel that works over the Internet. It is
implemented in the physical layer of the network stack and is many
orders of magnitude faster than prior art while being very robust and
virtually invisible to software endhosts. Key to our approach is
software and real-time access and control over every bit in the
physical layer of a 10 Gigabit network stack (a bit is 100 picoseconds
wide at 10 gigabit per seconds), which allows us to modulate and
interpret interpacket spacings at sub-microsecond scale. In the talk,
I will discuss when and how a timing channel in the physical layer
works, how hard it is to detect such a channel, and what is required
to do so.



Bio:

Hakim Weatherspoon is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Computer Science at Cornell University.  He is on a one year
sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory.   His
research interests cover various aspects of fault-tolerance,
reliability, security, and performance of large Internet-scale (and
rack-scale!) systems such as cloud computing and distributed systems.
He received his Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley and
B.S. from University of Washington.  He is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow
and recipient of an NSF CAREER award, DARPA Computer Science Study
Panel (CSSP), IBM Faculty Award, the NetApp Faculty Fellowship, Intel
Early Career Faculty Honor, and the Future Internet Architecture award
from the National Science Foundation (NSF).



More information about Hakim is available online at his research group
website http://fireless.cs.cornell.edu and/or personal website
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~hweather