[Colloq] PhD Thesis Defense - Aldo Cassola - Providing Privacy from the Residential Cloud - April 21, 2pm - 366 WVH

[Fong, Andy]

Who: Aldo Cassola



When: Tue April 21st, 2pm



Where: 366 WVH



Title: Providing Privacy from the Residential Cloud



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.



In this work 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. We illustrate the vulnerability of what is considered the most secure implementation of WiFi, and devise a novel attack using a multi-layered targeted approach that makes the attack hard to detect yet having long range and effectively invisible to the victim.

We present the OpenInfrastructure system, a home-broadband research platform built on off-the-shelf components and open source software deployed over 30 Access Points through Boston, Houston and San Francisco urban areas. The data obtained over the course of the project since February 2011 confirms the ongoing trends in home broadband Internet access, and highlights the feasibility of providing network access over home installations. Finally we show how to improve privacy in network access is illustrated using Private Information Retrieval techniques over installations of tens of millions of users. We implement and evaluate the performance of the PIR as an EAP protocol extension, making it readily usable by providers and clients.



Committee:



Guevara Noubir (advisor), Northeastern University



Alan Mislove, Northeastern University



David Choffnes, Northeastern University



Omprakash Gnawali, University of Houston




Andrew W. Fong
Assistant Director for Graduate Admissions and Enrollment

Northeastern University
College of Computer and Information Science
360 Huntington Avenue
451 West Village H
Boston, MA 02115
617-373-8493
a.fong at neu.edu