2013 LTS Lecture Series: "Security and Trust in a Networked Immersed World: from Components to Systems and Beyond" by John S. Baras

Location: LTS Auditorium, Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences, 8080 Greenmead Drive, College Park, MD 20740

Speaker:
Prof. John S. Baras
Lockheed Martin Chair in Systems Engineering,
The Institute for Systems Research,
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department,
Fischell Bioengineering Department, and
Applied Mathematics, Statistics and Scientific Computation Program
University of Maryland College Park

Abstract:
The tremendous explosion of wireless devices and services have created unprecedented advances and are impacting every aspect of life and work. However, many of these advances and resulting expanding markets are critically endangered by weaknesses in security, integrity and trust. We first describe several of these emerging systems and markets in areas ranging from aerospace and automotive to healthcare and e-commerce to social networks over the Web. We then describe various physical layer (e.g. hardware and signal processing) techniques that can be successfully utilized to significantly strengthen the security of wireless devices and networked systems. We argue for the need of a “trusted core” in wireless networks and for the allocation of part of the security functionality to the physical layer. We next turn into the subject of trust in large networks and describe a new framework using multiple partially ordered semirings for analyzing reputation and trust dynamics and composite trust. Next we describe our work based on constrained coalitional games towards understanding the role of trust in collaboration and social networks. We describe several specific applications of these methods in securing distributed inference systems, SCADA sensor networks for power grids, wireless network routing protocols, LTE paging systems, wireless handheld devices for healthcare and e-payment systems. We close by describing the need for rigorous frameworks and theories for composable security and outline how these physical layer techniques can provide the foundation for such developments.

Biography:
Dr. Baras holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, 1970; M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University 1971, 1973. Since 1973, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and the Applied Mathematics Faculty, at the University of Maryland College Park. Since 2000, he has been a faculty member in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering. He is also the Founding Director of the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) from 1985 to 1991. Since 1991, Dr. Baras has been the Director of the Maryland Center for Hybrid Networks (HYNET). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He Received the 1980 George Axelby Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society and the 2006 Leonard Abraham Prize from the IEEE Communications Society. Professor Baras' research interests include control, communication and computing systems.