Matthew J. Edman's Home Page

I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, working under the supervision of Associate Professor Bülent Yener. My research interests broadly include anonymity and privacy, computer and network security, applied cryptography and signals analysis. I previously received an M.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer in 2007 and a B.S. in Computer Science from Baylor University in 2005. I am also a member of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon computer science honor society and recipient of Rensselaer's 2007 Hollingsworth Prize.

Current Projects

Key Generation & Authentication from Physical Layer Characteristics in Wireless Networks

I am currently funded under Dr. Yener's NSF Cyber Trust grant to explore and develop secret key generation and renewal algorithms for securing wireless networks by incorporating physical properties of the wireless channel. We will also be examining the use of physical layer channel characteristics in wireless device authentication schemes. Our work will leverage the flexible USRP2 hardware and GNU Radio software-defined radio platform.

Vidalia

I co-founded and continue to lead an open source software project called Vidalia. Vidalia is a cross-platform GUI for Tor, intended to make the Tor software easier to install, run, use and configure. We also try to make it easier for users to contribute to the Tor network by helping them set up their own Tor relay. Vidalia is currently distributed in Tor's Windows and Mac OS X bundles.

Publications

Journal Articles

Matthew Edman, Bülent Yener. On Anonymity in an Electronic Society: A Survey of Anonymous Communication Systems, to appear in ACM Computing Surveys.
[pdf] [BibTeX]

Conference Proceedings

Matthew Edman, Justin Hipple. Vidalia: Towards a Usable Tor GUI (poster abstract), 2007 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS '07), July 18-20, 2007, Pittsburgh, PA.
[pdf] [BibTeX] [poster]
Matthew Edman, Fikret Sivrikaya, Bülent Yener. A Combinatorial Approach to Measuring Anonymity, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI '07), May 23-24 2007, New Brunswick, NJ.
[pdf] [BibTeX]

Program Committees

2009 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '09)
2009 Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC '09)
2008 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '08)
2007 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '07)

I have also provided external reviews for the following selected conferences:

2008 Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES '08)
2008 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS '08)
2008 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS '08)
2008 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM '08)
2008 International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS '08)

Employment

I have spent the past two summers working with Paul Syverson at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Center for High Assurance Computer Systems, as part of the Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program.

Some of my other former employers include the U.S. National Security Agency, Parametric Technology Corporation and the Secure Decisions division of Applied Visions, Inc.