Title: Building Covert Communication Systems That Resist Traffic Analysis

Covert, censorship-resistant communication in the presence of nation-state adversaries requires unobservable channels whose operation is difficult to detect via network-traffic analysis.  One promising approach is traffic substitution: use an already-existing encrypted  channel established by some application and replace that application's data with covert content.

In this talk, I will explain the challenges of traffic substitution and show how substitution channels can fail even against simple network adversaries.  I will then discuss our experience designing and implementing Telepath, a new Minecraft-based covert communication  system.

Finally, I will present general principles for building covert channels that resist traffic analysis.

Title: Cultivating a National Culture of Cybersecurity

Global cyber threats are outpacing the ability of Western democracies to mitigate or defeat those threats.  The cyber capabilities of adversarial nation states have vastly improved in the last decade while cybercrime is set to become the third largest economy in the world by 2025.  At the same time, the global cyber workforce gap continues to grow at an alarming pace.  These trends, coupled with sluggish bureaucratic reaction speed, will nullify the U.S. and its allies' dominance in the information environment in the next few years – unless we do things differently.  This presentation will highlight why the status quo has led to many national shortcomings in cybersecurity and discuss why it is an existential imperative to start cultivating a national culture of cybersecurity today.