research-article

Walls Have Ears! Opportunistically Communicating Secret Messages Over the Wiretap Channel: from Theory to Practice

Authors:

Qin ZouAuthors Info & Claims

CCS '15: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Pages 376 - 387

https://doi.org/10.1145/2810103.2813702

Published: 12 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Physical layer (PHY) security has aroused great research interest in recent years, exploiting physical uncertainty of wireless channels to provide communication secrecy without placing any computational restrictions on the adversaries under the information-theoretic security model. Particularly, researches have been focused on investigating Wyner's Wiretap Channel for constructing practical wiretap codes that can achieve simultaneous transmission secrecy and reliability. While theoretically sound, PHY security through the wiretap channel has never been realized in practice, and the feasibility and physical limitations of implementing such channels in the real world are yet to be well understood. In this paper, we design and implement a practical opportunistic secret communication system over the wireless wiretap channel for the first time to our best knowledge. We show that, our system can achieve nearly perfect secrecy given a fixed codeword length by carefully controlling the structure of the parity-check matrix of wiretap codes to strike the proper balance between the transmission rate and secrecy. Our system is implemented and evaluated extensively on a USRP N210-based testbed. The experimental results demonstrate the physical limitations and the feasibility of building practical wiretap channels in both the worst channel case and the case where the sender has only the knowledge of instantaneous channel capacities. Our system design and implementation successfully attempts towards bridging the gap between the theoretical wiretap channel and its practice, alleviating the unrealistic and strong assumptions imposed by the theoretical model.

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Cited By

Jin MHe YLiu YWang X(2024)Covert Communication With Acoustic NoiseIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2023.328669232:1(207-221)Online publication date: Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2023.3286692
Jin MHe YLiu YWang X(2022)Furtively Connecting IoT Devices with Acoustic Noise2022 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN)10.1109/IPSN54338.2022.00023(195-207)Online publication date: May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPSN54338.2022.00023
Zuck ALi YBruck JPorter DTsafrir DAgrawal NRangaswami R(2018)Stash in a flashProceedings of the 16th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies10.5555/3189759.3189775(169-185)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3189759.3189775
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Walls Have Ears! Opportunistically Communicating Secret Messages Over the Wiretap Channel: from Theory to Practice
1. Security and privacy
  1. Network security

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CCS '15: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

October 2015

1750 pages

ISBN:9781450338325

DOI:10.1145/2810103

General Chair:
Indrajit Ray
Colorado State University, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Ninghui Li
Purdue University, USA
,
Christopher Kruegel
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGSAC: ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 12 October 2015

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National Basic Research Program of China
US National Science Foundation
National Natural Science Foundation of China

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CCS'15

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SIGSAC

CCS'15: The 22nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security

October 12 - 16, 2015

Colorado, Denver, USA

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CCS '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 128 of 660 submissions, 19%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,261 of 6,999 submissions, 18%

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CCS '25

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sigsac

ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

October 13 - 17, 2025

Taipei , Taiwan

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Cited By

Jin MHe YLiu YWang X(2024)Covert Communication With Acoustic NoiseIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2023.328669232:1(207-221)Online publication date: Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2023.3286692
Jin MHe YLiu YWang X(2022)Furtively Connecting IoT Devices with Acoustic Noise2022 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN)10.1109/IPSN54338.2022.00023(195-207)Online publication date: May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPSN54338.2022.00023
Zuck ALi YBruck JPorter DTsafrir DAgrawal NRangaswami R(2018)Stash in a flashProceedings of the 16th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies10.5555/3189759.3189775(169-185)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3189759.3189775
Li ZPei QMarkwood ILiu YZhu H(2018)Secret Key Establishment via RSS Trajectory Matching Between Wearable DevicesIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2017.276802013:3(802-817)Online publication date: Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2017.2768020
Huo YTian YMa LCheng XJing T(2018)Jamming Strategies for Physical Layer SecurityIEEE Wireless Communications10.1109/MWC.2017.170001525:1(148-153)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MWC.2017.1700015
Bisio ILavagetto FLuzzati GSciarrone A(2016)A Novel Active Warden Technique for Image Steganography2016 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)10.1109/GLOCOM.2016.7841524(1-6)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/GLOCOM.2016.7841524

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