David Wolinsky, Yale University

"Tracking Resistance with Dissent"

(Vortrag im Rahmen der "MPI Distinguished Lecture Series" in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

Abstract: As the most serious cyber-attack threats rapidly shift from untargeted toward increasingly targeted methods, it is becoming more crucial for organizations to protect the identity and location of their members against malicious tracking and surveillance. The common approach by organizations to use encryption is not enough, as metadata, such as the sender and receiver, has recently been shown to be as valuable and hence as dangerous as data. Employing existing anonymous communication tools, such as Tor, only deter but do not prevent tracking and targeting attacks. This talk describes three major challenges to protecting users: network-based traffic analysis attacks, intersection attacks against identities and traffic flows, and application / environment exploits. The talk then introduces practical approaches that address these challenges as implemented and evaluated in the Dissent project.

Bio: Bio: David Wolinsky is a research scientist and lecturer at Yale University. He joined Yale in the Summer of 2011 after obtaining a PhD at the University of Florida. His research efforts primarily focus on building practical and secure distributed systems. During his PhD, he built a free-to-join compute grid, Grid Appliance (HPDC'11), that combined NSF funded and volunteer resources to produce a 1,000+ node system with 100,000s of compute hours. At Yale, he leads the Dissent project (OSDI'12), a novel group anonymous communication protocol that turned an interesting theoretical idea into a practical system.