Dr. Brian M. Sadler of Army Research Laboratory (ARL)

Abstract:

Fingerprints are commonly understood as
traits that uniquely identify an individual, an object, or a
message, and can be exploited to detect and prevent
impersonation, fraud, or unlawful duplication. In this talk we
consider the intentional use of fingerprints to provide security in
wireless communications. This includes fingerprint design and
its embedding into a communications waveform, so that it has
several desired properties including stealth, security, and
predictable performance. The framework draws on
communications, signal processing, cryptographic hashing, and
information theory, enabling control of performance trade-offs by
design. Privacy and security analysis quantify the diminished
ability of an eavesdropper to detect and estimate the fingerprint,
limiting her ability to impersonate a legitimate user or to recover
the secret key. Fingerprints can also provide a way to
communicate, and a fingerprint set defines a covert signaling
constellation. This leads to a secret codebook design that
enables secure side-channel communications.

Biography:

Brian M. Sadler (Fellow IEEE, Fellow ARL) is the Army Senior Scientist for Intelligent Systems at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, MD, and lectured at Johns Hopkins University in communications and signal processing for 15 years. He has been an Associate and Guest Editor for a variety of journals in communications, signal processing, and robotics, including the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and IEEE Transactions on Robotics, as well as IEEE JSTSP, IEEE SP Magazine, International Journal of Robotics Research, and Autonomous Robots.  He received Best Paper Awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2006 and 2010, was a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE SPS Society in 2017-2018, and was General Co-Chair of the 2016 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP’16). His research areas have included radio and optical communications, sensor networking, autonomous multi-agent networking and control, physical layer security, semantic knowledge bases, aeroacoustics, and mixed-signal integrated circuit architectures. 

His current focus is on multi-disciplinary approaches to distributed intelligent systems, incorporating communications networking, distributed processing, learning, and control. This includes collaborative autonomy that blends resilient networking and processing, physical layer techniques for robust security and authentication, and new ways for using low-VHF communications in complex environments.

Email:

Address:Senior Research Scientist - Intelligent Systems, ARL, , Maryland, United States