Home

Short Bio

Triet Vo-Huu finished his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northeastern University in June 2015 under the supervision of Prof. Guevara Noubir. Previously he received his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Budapest University of Technology and Economics. His research interests lie in the area of wireless communications and security.

He has received the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (ACM MobiHoc) Student Travel Award, and the 2013 ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (ACM WiSec) Runner-up Best Paper Award.

During DARPA Spectrum Challenge 2013 he participated as a core member of Northeastern University team and obtained the Winning Award in the Preliminary Cooperative Tournament. His team made it to the final four during the Final Event. He was the recipient of the 2013 College of Computer and Information Science (Northeastern University) Research Award.

He has also served in the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference VTC 2015-Fall and Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ACISP) 2016.

Research

I am a system security engineer interested in wireless networks, communications, and security. My Ph.D. is focused on building practical and robust systems for countering and mitigating jamming attacks ranging from high-power jamming attacks to low-power rate attacks and specific jamming techniques against Wi-Fi communications.

Projects

Wi-Fi and Jamming Attacks

Wi-Fi is now emerging as the primary medium for not only wireless Internet access to residential users, but also for traffic offloading to commercial cellular services due to scarcity of spectrum and increases of deployment cost. Due to the ease of access to jamming devices (software defined radio, commercial jammers, etc.) adversaries are able to carry smart jamming attacks against Wi-Fi communications and effectively degrade the whole network. In this project, I am investigating the impact of jamming on Wi-Fi links. The preliminary results show that a new jamming technique based on the interleaving structure employed by the IEEE 802.11 standard can block the whole Wi-Fi link with a very small jamming power.

CBM - Conceal and Boost Modulation

Exposing the rate information of wireless transmissions enables highly efficient attacks that can severely degrade the performance of a network at very low cost. To resolve this issue, I developed an integrated solution for concealing the rate information, and at the same time, boosting the robustness of the transmission. My solution comprises a set of algorithms to find good generalized TCM codes and a cryptographic interleaving construction method to hide modulation and code information. [more...]

Countering High-Power Jamming Attacks

Jamming with high power is today's a realistic threat to wireless communication systems due to ease of access to jamming devices. Motivated by the importance of this problem, I designed and implemented a hybrid system consisting of a novel antenna design and a set of antenna control algorithms and jamming signal cancellation techniques that can cope with a jammer significantly more powerful than legitimate communication nodes. [more...]

BaPu - Bunching Access Point Uplinks

Today's uplink throughput of residential broadband networks are often much lower than downlink, limiting users from sharing HD video or uploading large files in real time. To address this problem, I co-developed a practical and efficient system for aggregating Wi-Fi access points to improve the uplink throughput. Our solution supports both TCP and UDP sessions and provides significant increase of uplink capacity.

IEEE 802.11s for Fractionated Satellite Systems

On the requirement of enabling communications between modules in fractionated satellite systems, IEEE 802.11s standard is selected to be implemented and tested for intermodule communication. Toward this goal, I designed and implemented the MCCA component based on the Linux wireless driver framework compliant to the IEEE 802.11s standard. The implementation supports all kinds of underlying hardware drivers and was evaluated to successfully improve the throughput of MCCA-enabled transmission flow.

Building Efficient Storage Scheme for WSNs

I designed and implemented a distributed scheme for data dissemination in WSNs that can tolerate link and node failures. The work consists of an implementation of Beacon Vector Routing protocol on TinyOS and development of a distributed error-correcting scheme deployed on Crossbow TelosB testbed. The results showed the solution's practicability for distributing light-weight and emergent data across sensor nodes.

Location Tracking using Smartphone Sensors

Leakage of users location and traffic patterns is a serious security threat with significant implications on privacy. While mobile phones can restrict the explicit access to location information to applications authorized by the user, the location is still leaked through side channel information. I co-developed a zero-permissions Android App that can infer vehicular users’ location and traveled routes using gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass information with high accuracy and without users’ knowledge. Through extensive evaluation via both simulations and real driving experiments, we show that the adversary can detect the users’ routes with a high probability, rendering a serious threat.

EPiC - Efficient Private Counting

In the era of cloud computing, where data is outsourced to untrusted clouds for massive computation, protecting the user privacy is a serious concern. Focusing on the fundamental operation on data sets: frequency counting, I designed and implemented a scheme for efficient counting on big data sets. The solution supports counting patterns defined by arbitrary Boolean formula and capability of hiding the user query information and computed result from the untrusted cloud, while sacrificing only modest overhead compared to privacy-leakage counting.