Remi Chou, an assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer science at Wichita State, has received a two-year, $156,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for research to ensure secure transfer of confidential information over wireless networks.

“The ubiquity of wireless devices makes them a target for malicious users, who could compromise them and use them as a proxy for malicious cyber activities, including impersonation, email spamming, click-fraud activities or denial of service attacks,” said Chou, who is working to increase protection from such attacks.

The title of his project is “Secret Sharing Under Communication Constraints in Wireless Networks.”

According to the project abstract, Chou’s research is aimed at developing new guidelines for sharing secret information through wireless communication that would improve security for users and minimizes cost.

The project seeks to understand the fundamental limitations on secret-sharing in wireless networks under bandwidth constraints and noise, and to then design a low-complexity coding scheme using tools from cryptography and coding theory.

The grant award is funded by the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research in the Office of Integrative Activities. Funds from the grant will finance for two years a graduate student to assist in his research, Chou said. 

Chou received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He joined Wichita State’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2017 as an assistant professor. His research interests includes information theory, secure communication, cyber-physical security and machine-learning.