Antonios Argyriou, Passive Wireless Sensing: Implications on Privacy and Counter-Measures

When: Monday, October 30 at 1:00 pm. Where: Quinn 211. Who: Dr. Antonios Argyriou, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Thessaly, Greece. Abstract: Emitters of wireless signals are all around us 24/7. These wireless signals contain digital information that may be the target of different types of cyber security attacks. However, besides digital encoded information these signals always contain side-information, i.e. information regarding the behavior of the emitter and the state of its environment. Examples include emitter location, velocity, used application, type of device, presence of humans in the vicinity, etc. This side-information may be extracted by unauthorized eavesdroppers with algorithms that fall under the umbrella of passive wireless sensing. In this talk we will first introduce the audience to the fundamental idea of passive wireless sensing and we will highlight some algorithms that pose specific dangers on user/emitter privacy. Next, we will present new ideas for engineering communication systems so that they are robust to these passive attacks, especially from eavesdroppers that deploy deep neural networks (DNNs). In the final part of this talk we will discuss how our ideas cultivate new inter-disciplinary research with machine learning, wireless security, autonomous systems, and of course emerging 6G systems.