ECE Telecommunications Seminar

*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************

Event Details
  • Date/Time:
    • Thursday October 9, 2014 - Friday October 10, 2014
      11:00 am - 11:59 am
  • Location: Centergy One Building, Room 5186 (CSIP Library)
  • Phone:
  • URL:
  • Email:
  • Fee(s):
    N/A
  • Extras:
Contact

Cordai Farrar

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

404-894-7890

cordai.farrar@ece.gatech.edu

Summaries

Summary Sentence: Boulat Bash, of the MIT Department of Computer Science, will give a seminar entitled "Covert Optical Communication," on October 9 at 11 am at the Centergy One Building, Room 5186.

Full Summary: Boulat Bash, of the MIT Department of Computer Science, will give a seminar entitled "Covert Optical Communication," on October 9 at 11 am at the Centergy One Building, Room 5186.

Speaker and Affiliation
Boulat Bash
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts

Abstract
Encryption prevents unauthorized decoding, but does not ensure stealth – a security demand that a mere presence of a message be undetectable. We characterize the ultimate limit of covert communication that is secure against the most powerful physically-permissible adversary. We show that, although it is impossible over a pure-loss channel, covert communication is attainable in the presence of any excess noise, such as a $300$K thermal blackbody. In this case, $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n})$ bits can be transmitted reliably and covertly in $n$ optical modes using standard optical communication equipment, such as a laser-light transmitter and a homodyne receiver. The all-powerful adversary may intercept all transmitted photons not received by the intended receiver, and employ arbitrary quantum memory and measurements. Conversely, we show that this square root scaling cannot be outperformed. We corroborate our theory in a proof-of-concept experiment. We believe that our findings will enable practical realizations of covert communication and sensing, both for point-to-point and networked scenarios.

Biosketch

Boulat Bash received his B.A. in Economics from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 2001, and his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2008. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He spent the summer of 2013 as a visiting scientist with the Quantum Information Processing Group at Raytheon BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His research interests include privacy, communications, information theory, and signal processing.

Additional Information

In Campus Calendar
No
Groups

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Invited Audience
Undergraduate students, Faculty/Staff, Graduate students
Categories
Seminar/Lecture/Colloquium
Keywords
No keywords were submitted.
Status
  • Created By: Jackie Nemeth
  • Workflow Status: Published
  • Created On: Sep 29, 2014 - 4:22am
  • Last Updated: Apr 13, 2017 - 5:21pm