Radu Sion
Stony Brook University, NY·Computer Science
Encryption protects data until someone forces a user to hand over the key, and then everything is exposed. Plausible deniability tackles this problem.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
plausible deniability
deniable encryption
data privacy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Design plausibly deniable storage systems that hide the existence of data from a multi-snapshot attacker, one who inspects a device repeatedly, while holding the user's devices and credentials.
- Combine faster access-privacy mechanisms with write-once memory encoding, where bits can be written only once, to make deniable storage both secure and practical.
- Harden deniability across the system stack using trusted execution environments, which are protected hardware zones, and use machine learning to generate decoy cover traffic.
- Build and demonstrate a snoop-proof Signal encrypted smartphone messaging app, and release the deniable storage systems for integration into mainstream operating systems.
More about the research
It lets a user hide that certain data exists at all, so that even someone holding the device and its passwords cannot prove the hidden data is there. Existing deniable systems fail against a realistic attacker who can inspect the storage device at several points in time. Such a "multi-snapshot" attacker can compare those copies to spot hidden changes.
Why it matters
People such as journalists or activists can be forced to give up encryption keys. Deniable storage could protect them by keeping the existence of sensitive data hidden even from attackers who inspect their devices repeatedly. Publicly released tools, operating-system integration and a coercion-resistant Signal messaging app could bring this protection to everyday phones and computers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ning Zhang
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Computer Science·Early-career
Provide guaranteed computing and I/O availability inside trusted execution environments despite an untrusted operating system, using the predictable timing of real-time cyber-physical systems to keep the trusted code small.
Xipeng Shen
North Carolina State University, NC·Computer Science
Design a data abstraction for Trusted Execution Environments that lets data exist and be managed separately from the enclave computing on it, addressing weak inter-enclave sharing, absent intra-enclave isolation, and poor scalability.
Gene Tsudik
University of California-Irvine, CA·Computer Science
Define an execution model for safelets, small safety-critical programs that must run no matter what, and formally verify the safety monitor responsible for executing them.
The school
Stony Brook University: 32 labs on PI Pages, $319M a year on research, 289 research doctorates a year.
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