As we continue to depend on the rapidly expanding wireless ecosystem, we are challenged with threats related to user privacy, data confidentiality, and critical system availability. A significant portion of these threats is attributed to the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions. Using commodity radio hardware, unauthorized parties can easily eavesdrop on over-the-air transmissions and breach the privacy of communicating users by tracking their whereabouts and movements, and inferring their associations, health state, and preferences. Common (application-level) cryptographic mechanisms fail to provide adequate security and privacy, as they leave low-level transmission identifiers open to traffic analysis. In this talk, I will present various examples of leaked transmission signatures and discuss how they have been used to breach user privacy and launch sophisticated jamming attacks. I will then present various mitigation techniques for obfuscating wireless fingerprints and countering malicious eavesdropping.

Marwan Krunz is the Kenneth VonBehren Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, the University of Arizona. He  holds a joint appointment in the CS Department. Since April 2013, he has been the site co-director of the Broadband Wireless Access and Applications Center, a multi-university industry-focused NSF center that includes 5 university sites and 16+ industry affiliates. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Michigan State University in 1995. He joined the University of Arizona in January 1997, after a brief postdoctoral stint at the University of Maryland. In 2010, he was a Visiting Chair of Excellence at the University of Carlos III de Madrid. He previously held other visiting research positions at INRIA-Sophia Antipolis, HP Labs, University of Paris VI, University of Paris V, University of Jordan, and US West Advanced Technologies. Dr. Krunz’s research interests lie in the areas of wireless communications and networking, with emphasis on resource management, adaptive protocols, and security issues. He has published more than 235 journal articles and peer-reviewed conference papers, and is a co-inventor on several US patents. M. Krunz is an IEEE Fellow, an Arizona Engineering Faculty Fellow (2011-2014), and an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer (2013 and 2014). He was the recipient of the 2012 IEEE TCCC Outstanding Service Award. He received the NSF CAREER award in 1998. He currently serves on the editorial board for the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networks. Previously, he served on the editorial boards for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, Computer Communications Journal, and the IEEE Communications Interactive Magazine. He was the general vice-chair for WiOpt 2016, TPC chair (Networking Track) for WCNC 2016, general co-chair for WiSec’12, TPC chair for INFOCOM’04, TPC co-chair for SECON’05, TPC co-chair for WoWMoM’06, and others. He was the keynote speaker, an invited panelist, and a tutorial presenter at numerous international conferences.