Side and Covert Channels: The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of Modern Technologies

Date: 27 August 2020, 16.00-17.00 AEST

Recording:https://webcast.csiro.au/#/videos/feb2870c-acee-4034-be5e-148cf1826b33

Slides:Mauro Conti Covert & Side Channels

Title: Side and Covert Channels: The Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of Modern Technologies

Guest speaker: Professor Mauro Conti, University of Padua, Italy

Professor Mauro Conti currently researches at the University of Padua, Italy, and is also affiliated with TU Delft and UW Seattle. He obtained his PhD from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, in 2009, after which he was a Post-Doctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

In 2011 he joined the University of Padua. He has been awarded with a Marie Curie Fellowship (2012) by the European Commission and with a Fellowship by the German DAAD (2013). His main research interest is in the area of Security and Privacy.

Abstract: Professor Mauro Conti from Italy’s University of Padua, will address the double-edged nature of the Internet of Things – the good and the bad.

While Smartphone and IoT devices usage become more and more pervasive, people start also asking to which extent such devices can be maliciously exploited as “tracking devices”. The concern is not only related to an adversary taking physical or remote control of the device, but also to what a passive adversary can observe from the device communications.

He will address threats coming from contextual information and to which extent it is feasible, for example, to identify the specific actions that a user is doing on mobile apps by eavesdropping their encrypted network traffic. He will also discuss the possibility of building covert and side channels leveraging timing, heat, energy consumption and audio signals, to steal information from mobile devices, as well as inferring keypresses, password and PINs.