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The Advanced Network Colloquium Series

Wireless networks are vulnerable to intrusion and attack. Even the strongest encryption and authentication are not sufficient to protect the network. Because signal propagates in shared media, the very acts of transmission, easily detectable using simple devices, reveal crucial aspects of networking. For example, by listening the widely used RTS-CTS exchanges, an eavesdropper can guess the transmitter-receiver pair without decoding the content of the transmission. If eavesdropping sensors are geographically distributed in the network, a malicious attacker can obtain medium access control (MAC) and routing information and track messages propagating in the network, which allows the adversary to jam the network at a crucial time or launch a denial-of-service attack.
We present in this talk two related problems. The first is the detection of information flow where we address some of the following questions: Can a route be discovered by eavesdropping sensors? What are the fundamental limits of hiding the information flow in a multihop setup? What are the effective ways of detecting information flows when they are detectable? The second problem is on defending eavesdropping via randomized scheduling. Here we are interested in the achievable network flow under secrecy constraints.

Lang Tong is the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Professor in Engineering at Cornell University Ithaca, New York. Lang Tong received the B.E. degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1985, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering in 1987 and 1991, respectively, from the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana. He was a Postdoctoral Research Affiliate at the Information Systems Laboratory, Stanford University in 1991.
Lang Tong is a Fellow of IEEE. He received the 1993 Outstanding Young Author Award from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, the 2004 best paper award (with Min Dong) from IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the 2004 Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society (with Parvathinathan Venkitasubramaniam and Srihari Adireddy). He is also a coauthor of five student paper awards. He received Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research.