Computer Science Colloquia
Friday, April 12, 2013
Prateek Mittal
Host: Dave Evans
3:30 PM, MEC 205, followed by a reception in Rice Hall Fourth Floor Atrium (west end)
Avoiding Communication in Linear Algebra
ABSTRACT
Our online communications are plagued by increasing threats to
security and privacy. Sophisticated surveillance technologies can
compromise user privacy, and the insecurity of network protocols
threatens the safety of our critical infrastructure. In this talk, I
argue that network science can play an important role in cybersecurity
by illustrating how understanding and manipulating structural properties
of networks can inform the design of trustworthy communication systems.
First, I will discuss how network structure can be leveraged to detect
and isolate malicious (Sybil) accounts in online social networks. The
SybilInfer system that I developed uses this approach by exploiting
differences in mixing properties between benign accounts and malicious
accounts. SybilInfer demonstrates how graph theoretic machine learning
techniques can be applied to security problems. Second, I will discuss
how specially designed network structures can help protect users'
privacy by enabling them to communicate anonymously. The ShadowWalker
system that I developed for anonymous communication is built around a
novel network topology, which is both fast mixing and inherently
verifiable. This allows ShadowWalker to scale to millions of users while
being resilient to attacks on user privacy. Finally, I will conclude by
highlighting the potential of leveraging complex network structures in a
broad range of security and privacy problems.
Bio: Prateek Mittal is a postdoctoral scholar in Electrical Engineering
and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. His
research focuses on building secure and privacy-preserving systems,
drawing on techniques from applied cryptography, distributed systems,
large scale machine learning and network science. His work has
influenced the design of widely-used systems such as the Tor network. He
received the M.E. Van Valkenburg graduate research award for outstanding
doctoral research, the Rambus Computer Engineering fellowship, and the
ACM CCS 2008 outstanding paper award. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in
Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.
*Mr. Mittal is a faculty candidate for the Department of Computer Science