Abstract
Technological advances have proliferated in several sectors by developing additional capabilities in the field of systems engineering. These improvements enabled the deployment of new and smart products. Today, wireless body area networks (WBAN) are commonly used to collect humans’ information, hence this evolution exposes wireless systems to new security threats. Recently, the interest by cyber-criminals in this information has increased. Many of these wireless devices are equipped with passive speakers and microphones that may be used to exchange data with each other. This paper describes the application of the watermark-based blind physical layer security (WBPLSec) to acoustic communications as unconventional wireless link. Since wireless sensors have a limited computation power the WBPLSec is a valuable physical layer standalone solution to save energy. Actually, this protocol does not need any additional radio frequency (RF) connection. Indeed, it combines watermarking and a jamming techniques over sound-waves to create secure region around the legitimate receiver. Due to their nature, wireless communications might experience eavesdropping attacks. The analysis proposed in this paper, addresses countermeasures against confidentiality attacks on short-range wireless communications. The experiments over the acoustic air-gap channel showed that WBPLSec can create a region two meters wide in which wireless nodes are able to communicate securely. Therefore, the results favor the use of this scheme as a key enabling technology to protect the confidentiality in wireless sensor networks.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Breach level index. https://breachlevelindex.com.
Cost of a Data Breach Study. https://www.ibm.com/security/data-breach.
Dropbox. https://www.dropbox.com.
Equifax. https://www.equifax.com/personal.
Experian. https://www.experian.com.
Gemalto. https://www.gemalto.com.
LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com.
MathWorks. http://www.mathworks.com.
Report: Healthcare Industry Workers Lack Basic Cybersecurity Awareness. https://www.healthcare-informatics.com/news-item/cybersecurity/report-healthcare-employees-are-low-hanging-fruit-social-engineering-attacks.
The Worst Data Breaches of the Last 10 Years. https://www.asecurelife.com/the-worst-data-breaches-of-the-last-10-years.
IEEE Standard for Local and metropolitan area networks—Part 15.6: Wireless Body Area Networks, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1109/IEEESTD.2012.6161600.
R. J. Anderson, Security Engineering—A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, vol. 2nd, WileyNew York, 2008.
D. B. Arbia, M. M. Alam, Y. L. Moullec and E. B. Hamida, Communication challenges in on-body and body-to-body wearable wireless networks—a connectivity perspective, Technologies, Vol. 5, No. 3, p. 43, 2017. https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies5030043.
I. J. Cox, J. Kilian, F. Leighton and T. Shamoon, Secure spread spectrum watermarking for multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Vol. 6, No. 12, pp. 1673–1687, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1109/83.650120.
I. Csiszar and J. Korner, Broadcast channels with confidential messages, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 339–348, 1978. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1978.1055892.
L. Deshotels, Inaudible sound as a covert channel in mobile devices. In: 8th USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT 14). USENIX Association. San Diego, CA, (2014). https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot14/workshop-program/presentation/deshotels.
M. Frustaci, P. Pace, and G. Aloi, Securing the IoT world: Issues and perspectives. In: 2017 IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN), pp. 246–251, (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCN.2017.8088629.
M. Frustaci, P. Pace, G. Aloi and G. Fortino, Evaluating critical security issues of the IoT world: present and future challenges, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 2483–2495, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2017.2767291.
M. Guri, Y. A. Solewicz, A. Daidakulov, and Y. Elovici, MOSQUITO: Covert ultrasonic transmissions between two air-gapped computers using speaker-to-speaker communication. CoRR abs/1803.03422, 2018. arxiv:1803.03422.
M. Hanspach, and M. Goetz, On covert acoustical mesh networks in air. CoRR abs/1406.1213, 2014. arxiv:1406.1213.
W. Harrison, J. Almeida, M. Bloch, S. McLaughlin and J. Barros, Coding for secrecy: an overview of error-control coding techniques for physical-layer security, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Vol. 30, No. 5, pp. 41–50, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2013.2265141.
Z. Harvest, B. E. SqueakyChat, Ultrasonic communication using commercial notebook computers, 2014. https://github.com/bonniee/ultrasonic/blob/master/SqueakyChat.pdf.
S. Holm, O.B. Hovind, S. Rostad, and R. Holm. Indoors data communications using airborne ultrasound. In: Proceedings (ICASSP ’05) IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2005, vol. 3, pp. iii/957–iii/960 Vol. 3, (2005).
H. Karl and A. Willig, Protocols and Architectures for Wireless Sensor Networks, Wiley-InterscienceNew York, NY, 2007.
F. D. Kramer and S. H. Starr, Cyberpower and National Security, Potomac BooksWashington, 2009.
F. Ladich. Acoustic communication in fishes: temperature plays a role. Fish and Fisheries, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 598–612. https://doi.org/10.1111/faf.12277. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/faf.12277.
B.W. Lampson,. A note on the confinement problem. Commun. ACM, Vol. 16, No. 10, pp. 613–615, 1973. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/362375.362389.
H. Malvar and D. Florencio, Improved spread spectrum: a new modulation technique for robust watermarking, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 51, No. 4, pp. 898–905, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSP.2003.809385.
W. Mao, J. He, H. Zheng, Z. Zhang, and L. Qiu, High-precision acoustic motion tracking: Demo. In: Proceedings of the 22Nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom ’16, pp. 491–492. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2016). http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2973750.2985617.
C. Otto, A. Milenković, C. Sanders and E. Jovanov. System architecture of a wireless body area sensor network for ubiquitous health monitoring. J. Mob. Multimed., Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 307–326, 2005. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2010498.2010502.
J. G. Proakis, Digital Communications, 4th ed. McGraw-HillBoston, Boston, 2000. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/mh021/00025305.html.
L. Rabiner and B. H. Juang, Fundamentals of Speech Recognition, Prentice-Hall IncUpper Saddle River, NJ, 1993.
C. Shannon, Communication theory of secrecy systems, The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 656–715, 1949. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1949.tb00928.x.
C. E. Shannon, Communication in the presence of noise, Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 10–21, 1949. https://doi.org/10.1109/JRPROC.1949.232969.
S. Soderi, Security in body networks: watermark-based communications on air-gap acoustic channel. In: 13th EAI International Conference on Body Area Networks (Bodynets2018). Oulu, Finland, 2018.
S. Soderi, L. Mucchi, M. Hämäläinen, A. Piva, and J.H. Iinatti, Physical layer security based on spread-spectrum watermarking and jamming receiver. Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, Vol. 28, No. 7, 2017. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/journals/ett/ett28.html#SoderiMHPI17.
M. Toorani, Security analysis of the IEEE 802.15.6 Standard, International Journal of Communication Systems, Vol. 29, No. 17, pp. 2471–2489, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.3120.
Q. Wang, K. Ren, M. Zhou, T. Lei, D. Koutsonikolas, and L. Su, Messages behind the sound: real-time hidden acoustic signal capture with smartphones. In: Proceedings of the 22Nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom ’16, pp. 29–41. ACM, New York, NY (2016). 10.1145/2973750.2973765. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2973750.2973765.
A. Wyner, The wire-tap channel, The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 54, No. 8, pp. 1355–1387, 1975. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1975.tb02040.x.
X. Zhang, J. Liu, S. Chen, Y. Kong, and K. Ren, PriWhisper+: An enhanced acoustic short-range communication system for smartphones. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, pp. 1–1, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2018.2850524.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Appendices
Appendix 1: Watermarking
Cox et al. [14] in 1997 defined the methodology for the digital watermarking. In accordance to his paradigm, three formulas can be utilized to compute the watermarked signal \(v'\). These equations are
where v(i) is the ith sample of the signal, \(\mu\) is the scaling parameter and x(i) is the watermark.
Appendix 2: Cosine Law
Alice, Bob and Eve form a triangle, as shown in Fig. 19.
Using the cosine law, the distance between the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper, i.e. \(d_{BE}\), is given by
where \(d_{AE}\) is the distance between Alice and Eve, \(d_{AB}\) is the distance between Alice and Bob. \(\theta\) denotes the angle between \(d_{AB}\) and \(d_{AE}\).
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Soderi, S. Acoustic-Based Security: A Key Enabling Technology for Wireless Sensor Networks. Int J Wireless Inf Networks 27, 45–59 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10776-019-00473-4
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10776-019-00473-4