Meeting and Seminar Archive:
Date: Oct 12, 2009 ~IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer~
Title: Detection of Information Flow and Anonymous Networking
Speaker: Prof. Lang Tong, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University
Abstract:
In a wireless network, transmission activities
can be easily monitored using simple devices.
Given the record of transmissions from
a set of nodes, one may be able to assertain
whether these nodes are engaged in some
networking operations. While the content of
a wireless transmissions can be protected
by cryptographical techniques, the
acts of transmission may reveal
crtical information about network
operations such as routing and multicasting.
In this talk, we consider two related problems.
The first is the problem of flow detection:
given observations from a set of traffic sensors,
to what extent can the presence of an information
flow be detected? We present results on
the fundamental limit of detectability.
The second probem is anonymous networking:
to what extent can we hide an information flow.
Here we use information theoretic measures
to characterize the tradeoff between anonymity
vs. network throughput.
Biography:
Lang Tong is the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Professor
in Engineering at Cornell University. He
received his PhD degree from the University of
Notre Dame and was a Postdoc Research Affilate
at Stanford University.
Lang Tong's research interest lies in the general
area of statistical signal processing, communication
systems, and networks. He received the 2004
Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the 2004
Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award from
the IEEE Communications Society, and the
1993 Outstanding Young Author Award from the
IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.
