Silence is Golden: exploiting silence and jamming to communicate

Speaker: Dr. Gabriele Oligeri, University of Roma Tre, Italy
Date and time: May 14, 2014, 14:00
Location: BME, Informatics Building, IB 110

Abstract: Jamming techniques require just moderate resources to be
deployed, while their effectiveness in disrupting communications is
unprecedented. In this talk we introduce several contributions to
jamming mitigation. In particular, we introduce a novel adversary model
that has both (unlimited) jamming reactive capabilities as well as
powerful (but limited) proactive jamming capabilities. Under this
dreadful but yet realistic adversary model, the communication bandwidth
provided by current anti-jamming solutions drops to zero. We then
present Silence is Golden (SiG): a novel anti jamming protocol that,
introducing a tunable, asymmetric communication channel, is able to
mitigate the adversary capabilities, enabling the parties to
communicate. For instance, with SiG it is possible to deliver a 128 bits
long message with a probability greater than 99% in 4096 time slots in
the presence of a jammer that jams all on-the-fly communications as well
as the 74% of the silent radio spectrum--while competing proposals
simply fail. The provided solution enjoys a thorough theoretical
analysis and is supported by extensive simulation results, showing the
viability of our proposal.

Short bio: Gabriele Oligeri is a Senior Research Engineer at the
University of Roma Tre. He received the laurea degree in Computer
Engineering from University of Pisa in 2005, and the Ph.D. in
Information Engineering from the same University in 2010. He has been a
Post-doc at CNR-ISTI for the period 2010-2011 and at University of
Trento for the period 2011-2013. His research interests include security
and privacy in distributed systems.