11/06 : Seminar - "Secure Wireless Networking An Information Theoretic Approach" - Dr. Lifeng Lai

Who: Lifeng Lai, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

What: “Secure Wireless Networking: An Information Theoretic Approach”

Where: Ferris Hall 414

When: 11am–12pm, Nov. 6 (Friday)

Abstract: With the rapid development of eCommerce, we need to send sensitive information over networks. Hence, it is important to develop schemes to protect the sensitive information against either passive eavesdropping attacks or active authentication attacks. In this two-part talk, I will show how information theory tools can be employed to enhance the security level of current systems. In the first part of this talk, I will focus on secure transmissions over wireless fading channels, in which the eavesdropper is a passive listener. I will show that, as long as there is a nonzero probability of the main channel being stronger than the eavesdropper's channel, we can obtain perfectly secure transmission, regardless of the computational power available at the eavesdropper. In the second part of this talk, I will develop an authentication counterpart of the Wyner's wiretap channel model. In this model, we can fully characterize the fundamental limit of the success probability of the opponent's active attacks. Compared with the existing noiseless model, I will show that the success probability of the opponent's attacks can be significantly reduced by properly exploiting the presence of channel noise.

Bio: Lifeng Lai received the B.E. and M. E. degrees from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China in 2001 and 2004 respectively, and the PhD degree from the The Ohio State University at Columbus, OH, in 2007. He was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University from 2007 to 2009. In Aug. 2009, he join University of Arkansas at Little Rock as an assistant professor.

He was a Distinguished University Fellow of the Ohio State University from 2004 to 2007. He co-authored a paper that received the Best Paper Award from IEEE Global Communications Conference, 2008. He also co-authored a paper that was selected as a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE Symposium on Information Theory, 2007.