AASS Seminar - Brave New Threat: The Rise of Covert and Side Channels

Who: Professor Mauro Conti, University of Padua, Italy 
What: Seminar "Brave New Threat: The Rise of Covert and Side Channels"
When: April 17, 2025, at 13:00
Where: Hörsal T, Teknikhuset 
Remote attendance: https://oru-se.zoom.us/j/65096623293

Abstract
Information and Communication Technologies are deeply integrated into our lives and manage an increasing amount of our confidential data. We use these technologies in a variety of ways—sometimes even unconsciously—for our work, to interact with other people, or just for entertainment through games and music. Protecting the data these technologies handle involves more than just preventing adversaries from gaining physical or remote control of a device through traditional attacks, such as exploiting software or protocol vulnerabilities. It also includes addressing how adversaries might steal information through side and covert channels.

In this talk, we take a journey through representative research results we published in the domain of side and covert channels, ranging from work published in TIFS 2016 to more recent ones published in Usenix Security 2022, INFOCOM 2023, CCS 2023, DIMVA 2024, WWW 2024, some of which also demonstrated at Black Hat Hacking Conferences. We discuss threats arising from contextual information and to which extent it is feasible to infer very specific details. In particular, we discuss attacks such as inferring actions that a user is performing on a smartphone, by eavesdropping on its encrypted network traffic, identifying the presence of a specific user within a network through analysis of energy consumption, inferring information (also key details like passwords and PINs) through timing, acoustic, video or battery status information, or just the way users play games and listen to the music.

Bio
Mauro Conti is Full Professor at the University of Padua, Italy, and Wallenberg WASP Guest Professor at Örebro University, Sweden. 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 at the University of Padua, where he became Associate Professor in 2015, and Full Professor in 2018. He has been Visiting Researcher at GMU, UCLA, UCI, TU Darmstadt, UF, FIU, and Affiliate Professor at TU Delft.

He has been awarded with a Marie Curie Fellowship (2012) by the European Commission, with a Fellowship by the German DAAD (2013), and with a WASP Fellowship by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (2025). His research is also funded by companies, including Cisco, Intel, and Huawei. His main research interest is in the area of Security and Privacy. In this area, he published more than 600 papers in topmost international peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He is area Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, and has been Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2022-24) and Associate Editor for several journals, including IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, and IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. He was Program Chair for TRUST 2015, ICISS 2016, WiSec 2017, ACNS 2020, CANS 2021, CSS 2021, WiMob 2023 and ESORICS 2023, and General Chair for SecureComm 2012, SACMAT 2013, NSS 2021, ACNS 2022, RAID 2024, NDSS 2026 and 2027. He is Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the AAIA, Distinguished Member of the ACM, and Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe. In 2022, he was named Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, by the President of the Republic.