Efficient, Secure and Private Wide-Area Services in Untrusted Environments

Today, it is common to connect to Internet-based services through a variety of devices. While using the Internet, a user’s information is exposed to untrusted or unreliable environments, from the applications they are using, to the networks delivering packets, to cloud-based remote services. As personal information increases in value, the incentives for these entities to track and collect private data increases as well. Combined, these trends increase security and privacy risks.

In this talk, I will present two systems that address such risks in the wide-area setting and provide users with more control over how their information is exposed. First, I will describe the IPv6 pseudonym abstraction, an architecture that allows users to have flexible control of linkability of their actions. The key ideas in this work include a cross- layer design over network and application layers and a network-layer protocol that provides seemingly random IP addresses to a host while maintaining efficiency of routing. Next, I will talk about MetaSync, a system where we combine multiple untrusted service providers to build a secure and reliable file synchronization service. The key idea here is a client-only variant of the Paxos protocol for distributed consensus.

Date:
Speakers:
Seungyeop Han
Affiliation:
University of Washington