[Colloq] Thesis proposal: SafEdge for residential Networks: Building Privacy from the Bottom Up

[Francoise Niang]

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Title: SafEdge for residential Networks: Building Privacy from the Bottom Up
Speaker: Aldo Cassola

Date: Wednesday February 12th, 2014
Time: 5:00pm to 6:00pm
Location: 366WVH

Committee:
- Guevara Noubir (advisor)
- Alan Mislove
- David Choffnes
- Omprakash Gnawali (external member, University of Houston)

Abstract:

The growth of mobile devices and computing has continued in recent years
to the point where mobile network providers must not only upgrade their
networks to serve the new traffic-intensive content that their users
demand, but to actually turn to alternative methods of delivery, namely
WiFi hotspots and femtocells. This demand is driven in part by the surge
in streaming services, but also by the demand for ubiquitous access to
data hosted in cloud services.

The increased connectivity has changed user expectations for access to
their data. Cloud service providers have seen similar increases in their
user bases as clients migrate from laptops and desktop computers to
tablets and smartphones. The amounts of data and computation performed
in cloud services has always been of interest to eavesdroppers, and
their growth can only make it more valuable to them. In such a world, a
growing dependency on centralized providers makes them single points of
failures for privacy threats.

With residential broadband Internet becoming more commonplace,
always-connected home devices can collaborate to build cloud services
closer to the network edge to mitigate the threats, creating more
diffuse targets of attack. In this work we propose to leverage these
networks to provide improved privacy for network access control, and
edge cloud storage with little to no administrative overhead to home
network users. In particular our main aim is to provide IP location
privacy, anonymous access control, and efficient network performance for
residential edge services. We show our  prototyping work implemented
over our own testbed for residential devices that we will also use for
implementation and evaluation, and describe the proposed work to solve
the research problems emerging in this context.