07-12, 12:00–12:50 (US/Eastern), Little Theatre
Large-scale protests are an important form of civil action against authoritarian regimes. They inherently require communication, which leads these regimes to shut down the Internet in an attempt to quash the movement. Smartphone mesh messaging has been explored as an alternative, but is still too inefficient to deploy. In this talk, Tushar will describe Amigo, the first mesh messaging system designed for large-scale protest communication. They create routing and key agreement protocols for group chats, and show their effectiveness using representative protest simulations. Amigo is able to provide large-scale protests with anonymous group communications in the face of Internet shutdowns.
Tushar Jois is an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the City College of New York. He received his PhD in computer science in 2023 from Johns Hopkins University. Tushar’s research interests are broadly in computer security, practical cryptography, and censorship resistance. He focuses on the design, implementation, and deployment of secure systems, with the overarching goal of ensuring users’ privacy in their everyday lives.
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