Preventing Overshadowing Attacks in Self-Jamming Audio Channels

Abstract

Recently there has been a growing interest in short-range communication using audio channels for device pairing and as a self-jamming communication medium. Given that such channels are audible to participants they are considered more resistant to active attacks, i.e., the attack signal would be heard by the participants. In this paper, we investigate the validity of this assumption using two prominent acoustic self-jamming systems implementations. We show that basic overshadowing attacks are possible in these systems and that these attacks cannot be effectively detected by the participants if the attacker is close to the receiving device. Finally, we propose a novel physical-layer solution for effectively detecting overshadowing attacks, which can improve state-of-the-art acoustic self-jamming systems by ensuring channel integrity while not requiring fundamental modifications to these schemes.