Keynote Speakers

Dr. Mauro Conti, University of Padua, Italy

Title of the Talk: Can’t You Hear Me Knocking: Novel Security and Privacy Threats to Mobile Users

Biography: Mauro Conti is an Associate Professor at the University of Padua, Italy. He obtained his Ph.D. from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, in 2009. After his Ph.D., he was a Post-Doc Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. In 2011 he joined as Assistant Professor the University of Padua, where he became Associate Professor in 2015. In 2017, he obtained the national habilitation as Full Professor for Computer Science and Computer Engineering. He has been Visiting Researcher at GMU (2008, 2016), UCLA (2010), UCI (2012, 2013, 2014, 2017), TU Darmstadt (2013), UF (2015), and FIU (2015, 2016). 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. In this area, he published more than 200 papers in topmost international peer-reviewed journals and conference. He is Associate Editor for several journals, including IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials and IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. He was Program Chair for TRUST 2015, ICISS 2016, WiSec 2017, and General Chair for SecureComm 2012 and ACM SACMAT 2013. He is Senior Member of the IEEE.

Talk description: 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 without the above capabilities can observe from the device communications. Work in this latter direction aimed, for example, at inferring the apps a user has installed on his device, or identifying the presence of a specific user within a network. In this talk, we discuss 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. We will also discuss the possibility of building covert and side channels leveraging energy consumption and audio signals.

Dr. Sudip Misra, Department of CSE, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

Title of the Talk: TBA

Biography: Sudip Misra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Prior to this he was associated with Cornell University (USA), Yale University (USA), Nortel Networks (Canada) and the Government of Ontario (Canada). He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. He has several years of experience working in the academia, government, and the private sectors in research, teaching, consulting, project management, architecture, software design and product engineering roles.

His current research interests includes Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, Internet of Things (IoT), Computer Networks, Learning Systems, and algorithm design for emerging communication networks. Dr. Misra is the author of over 260 scholarly research papers, including 140+ reputed journal papers. He has won seven research paper awards in different conferences. Recently, he and his students won Samsung Innovation Award and the IEEE ComSoc Student Competition. He was also awarded the IEEE ComSoc Asia Pacific Outstanding Young Researcher Award at IEEE GLOBECOM 2012, Anaheim, California, USA. He was also the recipient of several academic awards and fellowships such as the Young Scientist Award (National Academy of Sciences, India), Young Systems Scientist Award (Systems Society of India), Young Engineers Award (Institution of Engineers, India), (Canadian) Governor General's Academic Gold Medal at Carleton University, the University Outstanding Graduate Student Award in the Doctoral level at Carleton University and the National Academy of Sciences, India - Swarna Jayanti Puraskar (Golden Jubilee Award).

Misra was also awarded the Canadian Government's prestigious NSERC Post Doctoral Fellowship and the Humboldt Research Fellowship in Germany. Dr. Misra has been serving the editorial boards of distinguished journals such as the International Journal of Communication Systems (Wiley) and the IET Wireless Sensor Systems (UK). In the past, he served as the Associate Editor/Editorial Board Member of the Telecommunication Systems Journal (Springer), Security and Communication Networks Journal (Wiley), and the EURASIP Journal of Wireless Communications and Networking, IET Communications Journal, and the Computers and Electrical Engineering Journal (Elsevier).

Misra has published 9 books in the areas of wireless ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, wireless mesh networks, communication networks and distributed systems, network reliability and fault tolerance, and information and coding theory, published by reputed publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Springer, Wiley, and World Scientific.Dr. Misra was invited to chair several international conference/workshop programs and sessions. He served in the program committees of several international conferences. He was also invited to deliver keynote/invited lectures in over 30 international conferences in USA, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa.