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Speaker "Bob Baxley" Details Back

 

Topic

Using Radio Frequency Data to Secure the IoT

Abstract

We are on the verge of seeing an avalanche of IoT wireless devices enter the marketplace. According to Gartner research, the IoT market will exceed $300 billion in services and will include 26 billion devices by 2020. Since IoT devices tend to be low power and low cost, security and privacy measures may be poorly implemented or altogether ignored. A second trend paralleling IoT device proliferation is the emergence of consumer-level high-performance software-defined radio (SDR). Off-the-self SDRs can be purchased for as little as $20 and can be used to hack RF signals in a way that was prohibitively expense just a few years ago. The confluence of these two trends—low-security wireless devices and inexpensive SDRs—has major implications for security professionals that we will discuss briefly in this talk. This talk is devoted to discussing interesting aspects of the huge amounts of RF data that Bastille’s platform collects and processes. This includes a outlining the Machine Learning and Big Data stack at Bastille. Specifically, we will show our approach to using a lambda architecture to process IoT data with our Luigi/Spark stack.

Profile

For more than a decade, Bob Baxley has been a technology leader successfully implementing machine learning systems with an emphasis on cognitive radios. He currently serves as Chief Engineer at Bastille, the first cybersecurity company to detect and mitigate threats from the Internet of Things (IoT), where he leads the Data Science and Signal Processing teams. With IoT still in its infancy, Dr. Baxley is a pioneer at the forefront of this burgeoning industry, developing and building systems to sift through massive amounts of radio frequency data and protect enterprises from threats that continue to evolve in this relatively unknown frontier. Prior to joining Bastille, Dr. Baxley was the Director of the Software Defined Radio Lab at the Georgia Tech Research Institute where he led projects totaling over $2.5M in research funding for various organizations including, NSF,ONR, Army, DoD, and the Air Force. While there, he led GTRI’s team in the prestigious DARPA Spectrum Challenge. The team developed two waveforms: one based on differential OFDM and another based on direct sequence spread spectrum, and took second place out of 90 international competitors. Dr. Baxley also led a Strategic Initiative project on Cognitive Spectrum Awareness that was awarded the 2014 GTRI IRAD of the Year out of 81 projects. Dr. Baxley currently holds an adjunct appointment at Georgia Tech through which he advises graduate students and teaches courses. Dr. Baxley is the inventor of 17 patents in areas including radio frequency, wireless signals, electromagnetic and behavioral signatures, and electromagnetic threat detection and mitigation in IoT, among others. Dr. Baxley has co-authored over 70 peer-reviewed papers and has spoken at dozens of conferences globally on issues ranging from RF Threats in the IoT to Spatial Cognitive Electronic Warfare. Dr. Baxley holds a PhD, MS, and BS in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech University. During his graduate work, he was recognized with the Sigma Xi Best Thesis award, the Georgia Tech Center for Signal and Image Processing PhD Research Award, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Award.