CAREER: Towards Privacy-Preserving Wireless Communication: Fundamental Limits and Coding Schemes

日益增长的网络攻击可能导致数据泄露和第三方（包括公司、政府实体或医疗机构）持有的私人用户数据暴露。这种风险的一个可能的解决方案是在用户和第三方之间实现隐私保护协议，首先防止任何私人信息泄露。例如，用户可以在不泄露密码的情况下向第三方证明她持有有效密码。虽然存在此类隐私保护问题的解决方案，但这些解决方案很难适应无线网络的开放访问、噪声、带宽限制和分布式特性。采用不适合无线通信网络的隐私保护协议可能会导致次优/低效的解决方案，甚至更糟，会损害隐私。该项目通过一个专门适用于无线网络的新颖的隐私保护通信框架解决了这一挑战。与传统方法相比，预期的好处是更强的隐私保证、改进的数据速率和改进的可伸缩性。该项目整合了广泛的网络安全领域的教育组成部分，其形式为i)研究生培训，ii)以项目和研究为导向的本科生教育，以及iii)向K-12学生推广。本项目旨在建立一个全面的框架，使人们能够从根本上理解和设计保护隐私的无线通信协议。该框架的构建围绕三个要点进行组织。在第一个推动力中，为了提高数据速率和可扩展性，该项目研究了隐私保护协议的新构建块，这些协议包含无线通信约束并支持多用户通信协议。在第二个重点中，该项目研究了使隐私保护协议对对抗行为具有鲁棒性的解决方案。例如，合法的协议用户可能会表现出恶意行为，或者未经授权的网络用户可能会发起特定于无线的攻击，例如窃听、干扰或中间人攻击。在第三个重点中，该项目通过编码理论、密码学和深度学习的新编码技术，探索具有信息论隐私保证的低复杂度无线协议的构建。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Ever-growing cyber-attacks can lead to data breaches and exposure of private user data held by third parties, including companies, government entities, or medical institutions. A possible solution to such a risk is to implement privacy-preserving protocols between users and third parties that prevent any private information disclosure in the first place. For instance, a user could prove to a third party that she holds a valid password without revealing the password. While solutions for such privacy-preserving problems exist, such solutions are poorly adapted to the open-access, noisy, bandwidth-limited, and distributed nature of wireless networks. Resorting to privacy-preserving protocols unadapted to wireless communication networks may result in suboptimal/inefficient solutions or, even worse, compromise privacy. This project addresses this challenge with a novel framework for privacy-preserving communication specifically adapted to wireless networks. The anticipated benefits are stronger privacy guarantees, improved data rates, and improved scalability, compared to traditional approaches. The project integrates an educational component in the broad field of cybersecurity under the form of i) graduate student training, ii) project- and research-oriented undergraduate student education, and iii) outreach to K-12 students.This project aims to build a comprehensive framework that will enable the fundamental understanding and design of privacy-preserving wireless communication protocols. The construction of this framework is organized around three thrusts. In the first thrust, to improve data rates and scalability, the project investigates novel building blocks for privacy-preserving protocols that incorporate wireless communication constraints and enable multiuser communication protocols. In the second thrust, the project investigates solutions to make privacy-preserving protocols robust to adversarial behaviors. For instance, legitimate protocol users could exhibit malicious behaviors, or unauthorized network users could launch wireless-specific attacks, such as eavesdropping, jamming, or man-in-the-middle attacks. In the third thrust, the project explores the construction of low-complexity wireless protocols with information-theoretic privacy guarantees via novel coding techniques from coding theory, cryptography, and deep learning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.