Title:  Bridging The Quantum and Classical Paradigms in Wireless Security 

Speaker: Hesham El Gamal, University of Sydney

Time and Location: 3:10 pm, May 18 , Kemper 1127 

Abstract: In his 1948 seminal paper, Shannon introduced the notion of equivocation as a foundation for provable secrecy proofs. Since then, this powerful tool has been utilized to propose and analyze various secrecy schemes within the classical and quantum worlds. In this talk, I will review some of our works that contributed towards establishing a foundation for wireless secrecy based on information theoretic principles. Interestingly, these results show that the ``multi-terminal wireless channel’’ can be leveraged as a resource, instead of being viewed as a vulnerability, and allows for the joint optimization of secrecy schemes at both the physical and application layers. I will then describe our recently developed high dimensional quantum key distribution protocols. This novel protocol is inspired by the quantum illumination paradigm and borrows concepts from our earlier work on the security of the classical wireless erasure/fading channel with feedback. By bridging the quantum and classical worlds, the proposed scheme is able to simultaneously achieve perfect secrecy, a much improved noise resilience, and an infinite key rate per unit energy in the energy limited regime. I will conclude the talk with a brief overview of the Quantum Autonomous Systems (QAS) initiative, and other notable activities, at The University of Sydney.  

Bio: Hesham El Gamal received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, MD. He currently serves as the Engineering Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to that, he served as the Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Co-Director of the Institute of Cybersecurity and Digital Trust (ICDT) at the Ohio State University, USA (2018-2021). He served as a member of the faculty at the ECE department of the Ohio State University from 2001 to 2018. He co-founded inmobly inc., a venture-backed spinoff from the Ohio State University pioneering the use of AI technology in multi-media delivery, and served as its Chief Executive Office from 2012 to 2018. His prior industrial experience spans positions at Alcatel-Lucent and Hughes Network Systems.  

Prof. El Gamal was recognized as one of the top 1% highly cited and most influential researchers by the ISI web of science (2014-2017). He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (2019) and the IEEE (2010), a recipient of the OSU Innovator Award (2013), the OSU Stanley E. Harrison Award (2008), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2004), the OSU College of Engineering Lumley Research Award (2002), the OSU Electrical Engineering Department FARMER Young Faculty Development Fund (2004-2008), and Hughes Network Systems Annual Achievement Award (2000). He holds key intellectual property in the area of proactive communications, space-time coding/decoding, and graphical code design and has served on various editorial boards of IEEE journals and conferences.