Wednesday, November 6, 2002 Volen 101, 2:00-3.00 pm
Abstract: An increasing number of countries and companies routinely block or monitor access to parts of the Internet. Such censorship threatens the future of the Web and the Internet infrastructure as a medium for free speech and unfettered access to information.
To counteract these measures, we propose "Infranet," a system that enables clients to surreptitiously retrieve sensitive content via cooperating Web servers distributed across the global Internet. Infranet uses accesses to portions of the Web deemed legitimiate by a censor to create a covert channel out of innocuous HTTP transactions, and communicate requests for censored content to servers around the Web that act as Infranet Web proxy responders. Responses arrive from these legitimate servers, which hide the censored content using steganographic methods.
I will describe the design, a prototype implementation, covertness and security properties, and performance of Infranet.
Bio: Hari Balakrishnan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at MIT. He leads the Networks and Mobile Systems group at LCS, exploring research issues in computer networks, wireless networking, mobile systems, and pervasive computing.
Professor Balakrishnan received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998 and a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) in 1993. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2002), a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2000), an IBM University Faculty Award (1999-2001), the ACM doctoral dissertation award for his work on reliable data transport over wireless networks (1998), and best paper awards at the USENIX Security (2002), ACM MOBICOM (1995 and 2000), IEEE HotOS (2001), and USENIX (1995) conferences. He currently holds the KDD Career Development Chair in Communications Technology at MIT. He was awarded the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2001 and the Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2002 from the MIT School of Engineering.
Host: Liuba Shrira