Eavesdropping Vulnerability and Countermeasure in Infrared Communication for IoT Devices

Abstract

Infrared (IR) communication is one of the wireless communication methods mainly used to manipulate consumer electronics devices. Traditional IR devices support only simple operations such as changing TV channels. These days, consumer electronic devices such as smart TV are connected to the internet with the introduction of IoT. Thus, the user’s sensitive information such as credit card number and/or personal information could be entered with the IR remote. This situation raises a new problem. Since TV and the set-top box are visual media, these devices can be used to control and/or monitor other IoT devices at home. Therefore, personal information can be exposed to eavesdroppers. In this paper, we experimented with the IR devices’ reception sensitivity using remotes. These experiments were performed to measure the IR reception sensitivity in terms of distance and position between the device and the remote. According to our experiments, the transmission distance of the IR remote signal is more than 20 m. The experiments also revealed that curtains do not block infrared rays. Consequently, eavesdropping is possible to steal the user’s sensitive information. This paper proposes a simple, practical, and cost-effective countermeasure against eavesdropping, which does not impose any burden on users. Basically, encryption is used to prevent the eavesdropping. The encryption key is created by recycling a timer inside the microcontroller typically integrated in a remote. The key is regenerated whenever the power button on a remote is pressed, providing the limited lifecycle of the key. The evaluation indicates that the XOR-based encryption is practical and effective in terms of the processing time and cost.

Securing Infrared Communication in Nuclear Power Plants: Advanced Encryption for Infrared Sensor Networks

“…In Akgul's work in 2011 [12], authors proposed a new protocol and applied the Tiny Encryption Algorithm (TEA) symmetric cipher algorithm [13], but the reason for suggesting the new protocol and using the encryption algorithm was not sufficient. More recently, Kim and Suh focused on the structure of the IR transaction data packet and indicated that the packet can be divided into two sections: address and command (data) [14]. The authors applied secret key encryption for the IR data and suggested that rather than encrypting the entire message, partial encryption of only address section can be beneficial to save power and hardware area.…”

“…We have adopted the idea of partially encrypting plain messages from [14], instead of encrypting the entire message, to save circuit area and reduce data transmission time. Additionally, we have adopted the non-linear S-box table pair (forward and inverse) proposed in Section 3.4.…”

A Study on Reducing Traffic Congestion in the Roadside Unit for Autonomous Vehicles Using BSM and PVD

“…PVD has a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) to check for errors [36], but it can only confirm that data corruption has occurred. Therefore, we benchmarked the method used by the IR remote system [37,38] to reliably send this message. This message consists of a simple binary system ('yes' or 'no') encapsulated within 1 byte; however, to ensure accuracy, an additional byte for data verification (inverted data) is included, doubling its size to 2 bytes.…”

Cost-Effective Signcryption for Securing IoT: A Novel Signcryption Algorithm Based on Hyperelliptic Curves

“…Also, there are types of routing attacks [15]. Passive attack-A type of attack in which the intruder accesses the communication link and listens to the private communication channel, e.g., eavesdropping [16]. Man-in-the-middle attack-This attack takes place when the external attacker breaches communication between two trusted entities and steals critical data [17].…”