Congratulations to Professor Emina Soljanin on her new NSF award for the project titled "Covert/Secret and Efficient Message Transfer in (Mobile) Multi-Agent Environments." This is a three year $500,000 collaborative effort led by Rutgers University (Emina Soljanin, PI) with NJIT. Rutgers' share of this award is $250,000.
As part of this project, Emina and her team will explore secret and efficient (preferably covert) communications by harnessing the resources brought in by smart everyday devices in emerging Internet of Things (IoT) environments. The research plan is organized in two central thrusts: The first thrust investigates a novel covert, secure and efficient communication scheme between mobile nodes, which has the main feature that any data transfer is only performed over short distances, thus reducing exposure to adversarial actions as well as energy and bandwidth requirements. The second thrust builds on the first one and devises secure coding schemes for the case where an eavesdropper discovers that messages are being exchanged and/or gets in possession of some helping IoT devices.
You can find more details on the project at the NSF page here. Professor Soljanin also participated in an American Masters podcast hosted by PBS celebrating the life of Hedy Lamar, along with Academy-Award-winning actor Susan Sarandon and filmmaker Alexandra Dean. Please find the podcast here where Emina discusses similarities of her NSF project to Hedy Lamar's work.
This is really cool stuff! Congratulations Emina!