Eavesdropping Attacks Research Articles

A Hybrid Encryption Scheme for Quantum Secure Video Conferencing Combined with Blockchain

Traditional video conference systems depend largely on computational complexity to ensure system security, but with the development of high-performance computers, the existing encryption system will be seriously threatened. To solve this problem, a hybrid encryption scheme for quantum secure video conferencing combined with blockchain is proposed in this study. In the system solution architecture, first, the quantum key distribution network is embedded in the classic network; then, the “classical + quantum” hybrid encryption scheme is designed according to the secret level required for the video conference content. Besides, the real-time monitoring module of the quantum key distribution network is designed to ensure that users can check the running state of the network at any time. Meeting minutes can be shared by combining with blockchain. In order to quickly query meeting minutes, a cache-efficient query method based on B+ tree is proposed. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional video conference system, the quantum secure video conference system sufficiently integrates the technical advantages of the quantum key distribution to resist the security threats such as channel eavesdropping and high-performance computational attacks while ensuring the stable operation of the classic system, thus providing a video conference system with a higher security level. Meanwhile, the query time cost of blockchain with different lengths is tested, and the query efficiency of the proposed method is 3.15-times higher than the original query efficiency of blockchain.

A lightweight secure authentication approach based on stream ciphering for RFID-based Internet of Things

In this paper, a new lightweight RFID-based authentication approach is proposed that uses stream ciphering techniques to preserve privacy between legitimate components. The proposed approach uses various key-stream generators such as And2LFSR, Geffe, and majority-based to eliminate the inherent linearity of LFSRs and construct a non-linear Pseudo-Random Number Generators (PRNG). The informal security analysis indicates that the proposed approach provides forward security and resists eavesdropping, tag tracking, replay, cloning, and DoS attacks. Moreover, simulations conducted through Cooja tool illustrate the effect of generator polynomial degree and proposed combinational generators on BER. The BER of communications has been evaluated in different quantities of (Eb/N0), ranged between 1 and 10, using the proposed generators along with different error control techniques. In addition, evaluations indicate that the proposed approach outperforms in terms of computational cost, storage spaces, and communication cost. Furthermore, statistical analysis proves resistance of the proposed approach to guessing attacks.

URadio: Wideband Ultrasound Communication for Smart Home Applications

Smart home Internet of Things (IoT) has a vibrant market with a wide range of appliances and sensors, spanning across smart home, smart city, and smart factory. However, the security and privacy of these IoT systems have raised serious concerns. Currently, most IoT devices rely on electromagnetic wave-based radio frequency (RF) for communication. Yet, RF has several inherent limitations, such as shortage of spectrum, susceptible to interference, and vulnerable to eavesdropping or jamming attacks. This article presents URadio, a wideband ultrasonic communication system. By leveraging recent advances in reduced Graphene Oxide (rGO), we design a new type of electrostatic ultrasonic transducer, which can achieve more than <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$6\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> bandwidth than commercial ultrasonic transducers. With this new transducer, we design an OFDM communication system to maximize its data rate for smart home applications. We build a prototype of URadio on a wireless testbed and evaluate its performance in several real-world environments. Our experiments show that URadio can reach up to 360 kb/s data rate at a distance of 81 cm or 20 Kb/s data rate at a distance of 20 m, which supports a variety of smart home applications. We further showcase URadio’s resilience against eavesdropping and jamming attacks, as well as demonstrate its capability of securely localizing objects in an indoor environment.

Wireless Training-Free Keystroke Inference Attack and Defense

Existing research work has identified a new class of attacks that can eavesdrop on the keystrokes in a non-invasive way without infecting the target computer to install malware. The common idea is that pressing a key of a keyboard can cause a unique and subtle environmental change, which can be captured and analyzed by the eavesdropper to learn the keystrokes. For these attacks, however, a training phase must be accomplished to establish the relationship between an observed environmental change and the action of pressing a specific key. This significantly limits the impact and practicality of these attacks. In this paper, we discover that it is possible to design keystroke eavesdropping attacks without requiring the training phase. We create this attack based on the channel state information extracted from the wireless signal. To eavesdrop on keystrokes, we establish a mapping between typing each letter and its respective environmental change by exploiting the correlation among observed changes and known structures of dictionary words. To defend against this attack, we propose a reactive jamming mechanism that launches the jamming only during the typing period. Experimental results on software-defined radio platforms validate the impact of the attack and the performance of the defense.

Security of Optical Beam Splitter in Quantum Key Distribution

The optical beam splitter is an essential device used for decoding in quantum key distribution. The impact of optical beam splitters on the security of quantum key distribution was studied, and it was found that the realistic device characteristics closely influence the error rate introduced by the wavelength-dependent attack on optical beam splitters. A countermeasure, combining device selection and error rate over-threshold alarms, is proposed to protect against such attacks. Beam splitters made of mirror coatings are recommended, and the variation of splitting ratio should be restricted to lower than 1 dB at 1260–1700 nm. For the partial attack scenario where the eavesdropper attacks only a portion of the quantum signal, a modified secure key rate formula is proposed to eliminate the revealed information of the attacked portion. Numerical results show that the QKD system adopting this countermeasure exhibits good performance with a secure key rate of over 10 kbps at 100 km and a maximum transmission distance of over 150 km, with only a small difference from the no-attack scenario. Additionally, a countermeasure to monitor the light intensity of different wavelengths is proposed to protect against the wavelength-dependent attack on optical beam splitters.

METODE ONE TIME PASSWORD MODIFIED SEBAGAI SISTEM KEAMANAN MONITORING IOT

Monitoring is an activity carried out to find out the process of running a program or system that has been designed, whether it runs well as expected or not, find out the obstacles that occur and how to overcome these obstacles. The cryptographic scheme to secure communication protocols is one of the most effective defenses against a variety of attacks, including eavesdropping and simple routing attacks, at the communication layer. One of the techniques studied in cryptography is encryption-description. This study aims to apply a one time password (OTP) modified algorithm into an IoT based temperature and humidity monitoring system using a Raspberry PI microcontroller device and a DHT 11 sensor. . The encryption process begins with hashing using the SHA method on the plaintext, followed by producing a private key and public key for RSA Signature encryption, the hashing results will be encrypted using the RSA Signature algorithm, the RSA Signature encryption results will be combined with the RSA Signature public key and plaintext, followed by producing an OTP that will be used as an AES key. Next the AES encryption process is executed, the OTP key will be encrypted RSA, the results of the RSA ciphertext and the AES ciphertext are combined and encoded with the Base64 method. The implementation of this security system gets the test results of the average duration for data encryption process is 435,163ms, and the data transmission with encryption process is 123,705ms

Wavesdropper

Most existing eavesdropping attacks leverage propagating sound waves for speech retrieval. However, soundproof materials are widely deployed in speech-sensitive scenes (e.g., a meeting room). In this paper, we reveal that human speech protected by an isolated room can be compromised by portable and commercial off-the-shelf mmWave devices. To achieve this goal, we develop Wavesdropper, a word detection system that utilizes a mmWave probe to sense the targeted speaker's throat vibration and recover speech contents in the obstructed condition. We proposed a CEEMD-based method to suppress dynamic clutters (e.g., human movements) in the room and a wavelet-based processing method to extract the delicate vocal vibration information from the hybrid signals. To recover speech contents from mmWave signals related to the vocal vibration, we designed a neural network to infer the speech contents. Moreover, we explored word detection on a conversation with multiple (two) probes and reveal that the adversary can detect words on multiple people simultaneously with only one mmWave device. We performed extensive experiments to evaluate the system performance with over 60,000 pronunciations. The experimental results indicate that Wavesdropper can achieve 91.3% accuracy for 57-word recognition on 23 volunteers.

Secure NOMA-Assisted Multi-LED Underwater Visible Light Communication

Security issue in underwater visible light communication (UVLC) arises mainly due to the scattering effect wherein numerous photons are statistically generated when a light beam strikes a water molecule. This paper considers an underwater communication scenario wherein a floating vehicle (FV) transmitter that is equipped with multiple light-emitting diodes (LEDs) communicates with the two legitimate near-end and far-end underwater vehicles (UVs) in presence of an eavesdropper. In particular, two non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology-based optimal LED selection (OLS) and suboptimal LED selection (SLS) schemes are proposed to select a LED that can transmit the information with the highest secrecy rate against active/passive eavesdropping attacks. Furthermore, the FVT transmits the information to both UVs with the selected LED only. Utilizing the successive interference cancellation (SIC) characteristic, this paper derives the closed-form secrecy outage probability expressions for both single-LED and multi-LED transmission strategies for both known and unknown CSI. The security performance of the proposed multi-LED NOMA-UVLC is compared with the conventional single-LED NOMA-UVLC under the effects of air bubbles for both fresh and salty water types. In addition, the validity of the numerical results is verified through Monte-carlo simulation analysis.

Secure transmission in satellite-UAV integrated system against eavesdropping and jamming: A two-level stackelberg game model

Aiming at the physical layer security (PLS) secure transmission existing in the information backhaul link of the satellite-UAV integrated (SUI) network, a two-layer Stackelberg game model (TSGM) that can resist full-duplex (FD) eavesdropping and jamming attacks is proposed. The confrontation relationship between the UAV network and the attacker is established as the first layer Stackelberg game. The source UAV adjusts its own transmission power strategy according to the attacker's jamming strategy to resist malicious jamming attacks. The internal competition and cooperation relationship in UAV network is modeled as the second layer Stackelberg game, and the optimal cooperative UAV transmits jamming signal to the attacker to resist malicious eavesdropping attacks. Aiming at the "selfishness" of UAV nodes, a price incentive mechanism is established to encourage UAV to actively participate in cooperation, so as to maximize the advantages of cooperative communication. For the proposed TSGM, we construct the utility function and analyze the closed equilibrium solution of the game model, and design a three-stage optimal response iterative (TORI) algorithm to solve the game equilibrium. The simulation results show that the proposed TSGM can effectively increase the utility of the source UAV and improve the enthusiasm of cooperation compared with other power control models.

Digital Watermarking for Detecting Malicious Intellectual Property Cores in NoC Architectures

System-on-chip (SoC) developers utilize intellectual property (IP) cores from third-party vendors due to increasing design complexity, cost, as well as time-to-market constraints. A typical SoC consists of a wide variety of IP cores [such as processor, memory, controller, and field-programmable gate array (FPGA)] that interact using a network-on-chip (NoC). This global trend of designing SoCs using third-party IPs raises serious concerns about security vulnerabilities. Since NoC facilitates communication between all IPs in an SoC, NoC is the ideal place for any hardware Trojans to hide and launch a plethora of attacks. Due to the resource-constrained nature of SoCs, developing security solutions against such attacks is a major challenge. In particular, in an eavesdropping attack, a Trojan-infected router copies packets transferred through the NoC and reroutes the duplicated packets to an accompanying malicious application running on another IP in an attempt to extract confidential information. While authenticated encryption can thwart such attacks, it incurs unacceptable overhead in resource-constrained SoCs. In this article, we propose a lightweight alternative defense based on digital watermarking techniques. We develop theoretical models to provide security guarantees. Experiments using realistic SoC models and diverse applications demonstrate that our approach can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods.

Privacy Preservation of Optimization Algorithm Over Unbalanced Directed Graph

This paper proposes an algorithm with the property of privacy preservation to solve the multi-agent optimization problem, where the communication topology is a fixed and strongly connected directed graph with a row stochastic weight matrix. Here, we consider the external eavesdropper attack model and take the gradient information of the objective function as the agent's privacy information. In this algorithm, each agent adds an additional state variable that interacts with it with a time-varying weight. And this new variable performs gradient iterative calculation. The original state variable interacts with the new variable and the original neighbors. It is proved that the algorithm converges to the optimal solution of the problem and at the same time achieves the purpose of privacy preservation. In addition, the algorithm neither requires additional hidden signals, nor does it increase a large amount of calculation. Finally, a simulation example is given to verify the performance of the algorithm.

Perfectly Secure Message Transmission Against Rational Adversaries

Secure Message Transmission (SMT) is a two-party cryptographic protocol by which the sender can securely and reliably transmit messages to the receiver using multiple channels. An adversary can corrupt a subset of the channels and commit eavesdropping and tampering attacks over the channels. In this work, we introduce a game-theoretic security model for SMT in which adversaries have some preferences for protocol execution. We define rational “timid” adversaries who prefer to violate security requirements but do not prefer the tampering to be detected. First, we consider the basic setting where a single adversary attacks the protocol. We construct perfect SMT protocols against any rational adversary corrupting all but one of the channels. Since minority corruption is required in the traditional setting, our results demonstrate a way of circumventing the cryptographic impossibility results by a game-theoretic approach. Next, we study the setting in which all the channels can be corrupted by multiple adversaries who do not cooperate. Since we cannot hope for any security if a single adversary corrupts all the channels or multiple adversaries cooperate maliciously, the scenario can arise from a game-theoretic model. We also study the scenario in which both malicious and rational adversaries exist.

On the Security of Full-Duplex Relay-Assisted Underwater Acoustic Network With NOMA

Wireless underwater acoustic (UWA) networks serve several civilian and military applications. The multiple reflections and dispersion, along with the long propagation delay limit the sum rate of UWA networks. Earlier works discussed adding full-duplex (FD), relay assistance, and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to enhance the system sum rate. Another challenge in UWA networks is the power limitation of devices. Hence, power optimization is crucial to maximize the energy efficiency. Furthermore, securing the UWA network against eavesdropping is essential to guarantee the confidentiality of communication. This work optimizes the power to maximize the secrecy sum rate (SSR) of a FD relay-assisted NOMA (FD-R-NOMA) underwater acoustic network subjected to an eavesdropper (Eve) attack. The network is studied in two states: when the network has or not the channel information (CI) of the threat. FD-R-NOMA UWA network shows to be more resilient to eavesdropping with higher secrecy energy efficiency when compared to the conventional half-duplex orthogonal multiple access network. Also, the results reveal that knowing the CI of the Eve improves the SSR of the network. Besides, the results show the effect of factors like the location of Eve, interference cancellation efficiency, noise in the environment, and sensor distributions in the system.

High fidelity quantum blind dual-signature protocols

This work proposes two kinds of fault tolerant quantum blind dual-signature (QBDS) protocols with photon quartets, which are robust against the collective-dephasing noise and collective-rotation noise, respectively. In the protocols, the initial information needs to be signed by the message owner in addition to the signer, which will be well suitable for application in some E-payment and E-government systems that require the message owner to provide authentication information. Both QBDS protocols are constructed with logical qubits which are immune to the collective noise, thereby the protocols can provide higher communication fidelity with respect to the existing quantum signature protocols. Furthermore, the protocols had been proved to be secure against some individual eavesdropping attacks. Meanwhile, the protocols satisfy the characteristics of quantum blind signature (QBS) protocols such as unforgeability, undeniability and blindness.

Trusted authority based session key agreement and authentication algorithm for smart grid networks

AbstractThe information exchanged over the smart grid networks is sensitive and private. As such, proper mechanisms must be put in place to protect these messages from security and privacy violations. Although many schemes have been presented in literature to address these challenges, a number of them rarely consider concurrent authentication of smart meters, while some are inefficient or still lack some of the smart grid network security and privacy requirements. In this article, a novel concurrent smart meters authentication algorithm is presented, based on some trusted authority. Formal security analysis of this algorithm is executed using Burrows‐Abadi‐Needham logic, which shows that this algorithm provides strong authentication among the smart meter, utility service provider and trusted authority. In addition, session keys are independently computed and verified between the smart meter and utility service provider with the help of the trusted authority. Informal security analysis shows that this algorithm provides device anonymity, perfect forward key secrecy, strong mutual authentication and is resilient against replay, de‐synchronization, privileged insider, impersonation, eavesdropping, side‐channel, and traceability attacks. In terms of performance, the proposed algorithm exhibits the least communication and computation overheads when compared with other related schemes.

Physical Layer Security in Distributed Antenna Systems Using One-Bit Feedback Information

This article concerns the physical layer security (PLS) problem in distributed antenna systems (DASs), where eavesdroppers are equipped with multiple antennas. If both legitimate transmitter (Alice) and receiver (Bob) broadcast wireless signals via a DAS, the channel state information (CSI) between Alice and Bob may be exposed to an eavesdropper (Eve) due to the broadcast nature of wireless signals. Based on the exposed CSI, Eve can use multiple antennas to improve the eavesdropping capability on the confidential message transmitted from Alice. The prior PLS approaches to defend against the eavesdropping attack have two limitations. The first limitation is to assume that the CSI of Bob is available to Alice. The second limitation is to assume that there is no error in the feedback CSIs. In this article, we propose a new PLS scheme of a DAS by using one-bit feedback information. The basic idea of our approach is to generate a null transmission vector from the distributed transmitters of Alice to Bob while using different artificial noise components to protect the exposure problem of CSI between Alice and Bob. The proposed scheme has the following advantages: improved secrecy rate, rapid convergence, and good performance under a time-varying channel. We implemented our scheme and conducted extensive performance comparisons through simulations. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves the secrecy rate with 1.20 b/s/Hz as compared to prior approaches. At last, we present some interesting future works for the PLS problem in a DAS.

Machine-learning-based anomaly detection in optical fiber monitoring

Secure and reliable data communication in optical networks is critical for high-speed Internet. However, optical fibers, serving as the data transmission medium providing connectivity to billons of users worldwide, are prone to a variety of anomalies resulting from hard failures (e.g., fiber cuts) and malicious physical attacks [e.g., optical eavesdropping (fiber tapping)]. Such anomalies may cause network disruption, thereby inducing huge financial and data losses, compromising the confidentiality of optical networks by gaining unauthorized access to the carried data, or gradually degrading the network operations. Therefore, it is highly required to implement efficient anomaly detection, diagnosis, and localization schemes for enhancing the availability and reliability of optical networks. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach to accurately and quickly detect, diagnose, and localize fiber fault anomalies, including fiber cuts and optical eavesdropping attacks. The proposed method combines an autoencoder-based anomaly detection and an attention-based bidirectional gated recurrent unit algorithm, whereby the former is used for fault detection and the latter is adopted for fault diagnosis and localization once an anomaly is detected by the autoencoder. We verify the efficiency of our proposed approach by experiments under various attack anomaly scenarios using real operational data. The experimental results demonstrate that (i) the autoencoder detects any fiber fault or anomaly with an F1 score of 96.86%, and (ii) the attention-based bidirectional gated recurrent unit algorithm identifies the detected anomalies with an average accuracy of 98.2% and localizes the faults with an average root mean square error of 0.19 m.

Secrecy Performance Analysis of Parallel FSO/mm-wave System Over Unified Fisher-Snedecor Channels

This paper presents a secrecy performance analysis of a parallel free-space optical&#x002F;millimeter-wave (mm-wave) communication system with a selection-combining receiver over a unified Fisher-Snedecor <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal{F}$</tex-math></inline-formula>-distribution channel. The <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal{F}$</tex-math></inline-formula>-distribution model, with the proper parameters, may be used to describe both the mm-wave and optical channels. The security performance is specifically evaluated by deriving closed-form expressions for the average secrecy capacity, secrecy outage probability, and strictly positive secrecy capacity. We examine the three following distinct security scenarios: 1) An FSO-link eavesdropping attack, 2) mm-wave-link eavesdropping attacks, and 3) eavesdropping attacks on FSO and mm-wave links at the same time. Furthermore, to better understand the influence of various system and channel parameters, asymptotic analysis is performed at high signal-to-noise ratio values. Our developed analytical expressions provide an efficient tool for examining the influence of various system and channel parameters on the secrecy performance, including the atmospheric turbulence severity, pointing errors of the FSO link, fading severity, the shadowing parameters, as well as the number of diversity branches of the mm-wave links. Monte-Carlo simulations are used to verify the correctness of the numerical findings.

A Generic Secure Transmission Scheme Based on Random Linear Network Coding

Unlike general routing strategies, network coding (NC) can combine encoding functions with multi-path propagation over a network. This allows network capacity to be achieved to support complex security solutions. Moreover, NC has intrinsic security advantages against passive attacks over traditional routing techniques. However, due to the transmission of the global encoding kernels, the system is fragile to eavesdropping attacks with multiple probes. This paper proposes a generic unicast secure transmission scheme based on random linear network coding (RLNC). Specifically, the intended receiver generates a random matrix upon receiving the request from the source node, and then transmits each row vector of this matrix over a link reversely to the source node. Each intermediate node rearranges all received vectors to form a matrix by row, and then post-multiplies its local encoding kernel by this matrix to obtain a new matrix. Similarly, each row vector of the new matrix is reversely transmitted over a link to the source node. This procedure is performed until we have the source node, where the generalized inverse of the received matrix (or part of it) can be used as its local encoding kernel. Hence, the intended receiver can use the generated matrix (or the corresponding part) to decode the received data packets directly. We also analyze the security to demonstrate that the proposed scheme is at least as secure as other methods against wiretapping attacks. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme to demonstrate its utility.

A secure crossing two qubits protocol based on quantum homomorphic encryption

In order to solve the information leakage caused by dishonest intermediate nodes in quantum network coding, we apply quantum homomorphic encryption to the butterfly network, and propose a secure protocol for crossing two qubits. Firstly, in the communication process between two senders and the first intermediate node, two senders encrypt their measured particles and send them to the first intermediate node for encoding. If two intermediate nodes are dishonest and know the encryption rules between two senders and two receivers, or there is an external eavesdropper, none of them can recover the transmitted qubits of two senders from the encrypted transmitted particles. In this way, our protocol can transmit two qubits safely and crossly in the butterfly network. Secondly, by analyzing the internal participant attack and the external eavesdropper attack launched by dishonest intermediate nodes and an external eavesdropper respectively, it is confirmed that our protocol is secure. Finally, the experimental simulation results based on the Qiskit framework prove that our protocol is feasible.