Title:
Near field deniable communication
Near field deniable communication
Author(s)
Narain, Abhinav
Advisor(s)
Feamster, Nick
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Abstract
There is an increasing interest of companies and government agencies
to snoop on people's daily lives the increasing difficulty for people
to handle such scenarios. The need for private communications is
perhaps greater than ever before. Officials at the
NSA have stated that “if you have enough meta-data you don’t really
need content” and that “we kill people based on
meta-data”. People have long needed to keep the
communications among themselves private, but, increasingly, they may
want to conceal not only the messages that they exchange, but also
with whom they are communicating---or even the fact that they are
communicating at all. This latter type of communication is said to be
not only confidential and anonymous but also deniable, in the sense
that despite exchanging messages, participants can plausibly deny that
any such exchanges ever took place.
This dissertation develops techniques and systems that empower users
in physical proximity to have mechanisms for deniable
communications. Our work builds from the observation of noise in the
surrounding technologies like wireless networks or powerline networks. The
thesis particularly uses noise instead of protocol obfuscation to
create deniable channels between individuals who do not want any third
party to recognize that there is possible communication in progress.
Working with collaborators at Georgia Tech, I have built two systems
to explore two approaches at the link layer of wireless channel
in 802.11 protocol by means of Denali. Looking for alternate technologies I
stumbled upon innocuous-looking powerline networks
and led to the work Powerline Whisperer, where I
explored using the physical layer in powerline cables to do deniable
communication. Due to lack of available cover, the system does not
presume any already established communication channel to exchange a
message but rather depends on the thermal noise and the
electromagnetic interference due to devices present in the medium.
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Date Issued
2017-07-20
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Text
Resource Subtype
Dissertation