At reading group next Tuesday, 3/3, Tushar Jois (visiting from the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center) will give a talk on his work entitled "Mesh Messaging for Large-Scale Protests: Cryptography Alone Won't Save Us." Hope to see you there at 12:30pm in IRB 5105 or on Zoom! If you want lunch, please fill out this form before 12pm on Monday.
Abstract: Protests are an important tool in the fight against authoritarian power structures around the world. Authoritarian governments often respond to a large protest by shutting down the Internet in an attempt to stifle this communication. Smartphone mesh messaging has been considered a promising solution to this problem by academics. Given this research interest, it should be the case that mesh messaging is on the path to deployment to counter Internet shutdowns during large-scale protests. So why hasn't it? In this talk, we try to answer this question. We describe the challenges of mesh messaging in detail, and discuss the shortcomings of prior work. We also present our work, Amigo (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.
Tushar Jois is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the City College of New York, and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. He has also held visiting scholar appointments at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Dartmouth College. Dr. Jois's research interests are broadly in computer security, practical cryptography, and privacy. His research group, the Security, Privacy, and Cryptographic Engineering Lab (Spacelab), focuses on the design, implementation, and deployment of practical cryptographic systems with rigorous provable security guarantees. His research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Open Technology Fund, Sui Foundation, Google, and several CUNY research awards.