A group of Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students in the Secure Hardware Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) group won the Best Paper Award at the Mediterranean Conference on Embedded Computing (MECO) in Montenegro in June.

The paper was co-authored by all undergraduate students, with guidance from ECE associate professor Vincent Mooney. Three students were from ECE: Gabrielle Calderon, Andrew Hamby, and Valeriia Rubanova. Two others were from the School of Computer Science: Olivia Blanchette and Jing Liu.

“This is the first time I have ever seen an undergraduate team take an unknown research problem with no external funding or relationship to ongoing graduate research and turn the idea into a paper which receives an award,” Mooney said.

The paper titled, “Linguistic Encryption for Underwater Communication,” examined how to use a stream cipher to encode short-fixed length sounds for a swarm of robots to communicate with each other deep under water in a cryptographically secure fashion.

The idea was to "translate" simple commands into the constructed Toki Pona language, which are then mapped to dolphin noises. The dynamic nature of the constructed language made translation and decryption very hard without the stream cipher seed, thus creating a very secure communication system.

The technology has uses in search and rescue capacities as well as general underwater topological surveying.

The paper was selected out of over 100 papers published in the conference.

All the research was done by Mooney’s Secure Hardware VIP group with no outside source of funding.

The VIP program gives undergraduate students the chance to conduct ambitious, long-term, large-scale, multidisciplinary research projects under the guidance of faculty members, giving them substantial real-world experience.

“The VIP program allowed me to explore my interdisciplinary academic interests with the depth of a full research project alongside other highly motivated students,” Calderon said. “Even before this award, the experience I gained working on this project made it extremely worthwhile, especially because we had the flexibility to pursue a somewhat unorthodox idea.”