Speaker: Murtuza Jadliwala, University of Texas at San Antonio

Venue: Room 109, new CSE/CC building
Date: March 11, 2019

Time: 11:00 – 12:00

Abstract:

In this era of Internet-of-Things (IoT), new devices are becoming cyber-enabled at an extraordinary pace, many of which have traditionally never had a cyber-interface before. These devices are equipped with high-precision sensing capabilities that can capture fine-grained contextual information about end-users and their environment and can support a variety of novel context- and activity-based applications. However, despite its tremendous promise, the upcoming IoT paradigm is fraught with significant security and privacy challenges. In this talk, I plan to highlight two specific threats that exemplify this broader concern. In the first part of the talk, I will present an inference framework that attempts to infer unlocking codes of physical combination locks from the wrist motion captured by a smartwatch’s gyroscope sensor. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss user-privacy challenges due to modern Internet-enabled smart lights by presenting specific information leakage attacks that can be carried out by solely employing the light signal(s) emitted by these lighting systems. By presenting results from our extensive and realistic experimental studies, I will further highlight the feasibility of the presented attacks and present some potential protection mechanisms against the same. I will conclude by presenting a roadmap of open problems and future research challenges in this space.

Biography of the Speaker: Murtuza Jadliwala is currently an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), where he directs the Security, Privacy, Trust and Ethics in Computing Research Lab (SPriTELab). His research interests are broadly in the areas of mobile, network and distributed systems security and privacy, especially, security and privacy of modern cyber-physical and socio-technical systems and applications. He obtained his doctoral (PhD) degree in Computer Science from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York in 2008. Prior to joining UTSA, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Laboratory for Computer Communications and Applications (LCA1) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland (2008 – 2011) and an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Wichita State University (2012 – 2017). He was selected as a US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Summer Faculty Fellow in 2015. His research in mobile and wearable device security has been funded by numerous research awards from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), US Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) and AFOSR.