It should be no surprise to anybody that the use of wireless devices is becoming increasingly pervasive. At the same time, however, the best security practices – firewalls, virtual private networks, WAP and WPA encryption – don’t protect our privacy as well as we hope they would. The Trustworthy Wireless project at Intel Research Seattle is aimed at developing new protocols to protect privacy and developing new technologies that can help users understand what information about them is being exposed and to whom.

At the Seattle Lab open house event on October 1, several research projects were presented to address these issues. One of them was called “SlyFi”- a privacy preserving link layer. It was presented by Intel research scientist, Ben Greenstein.

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In this same Trustworthy Wireless area, Anmol Sheth discussed his research project called GeoFencing. Instead of using password protected wireless networks, GeoFencing confines the wireless radio transmissions at the physical layer to a user specified region – like your apartment or coffee shop. Using overlapping transmissions from distributed beamforming antennas the wireless signal only works at the intersection of these beams. Geo-fencing can adapt to regions of varying shapes and sizes.

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