Profiling the Strength of Physical-Layer Security

Abstract

Physical layer security for wireless communication is broadly considered as a promising approach to protect data confidentiality against eavesdroppers. However, despite its ample theoretical foundation, the transition to practical implementations of physical-layer security still lacks success. A close inspection of proven vulnerable physical-layer security designs reveals that the flaws are usually overlooked when the scheme is only evaluated against an inferior, single-antenna eavesdropper. Meanwhile, the attacks exposing vulnerabilities often lack theoretical justification. To reduce the gap between theory and practice, we posit that a physical-layer security scheme must be studied under multiple adversarial models to fully grasp its security strength. In this regard, we evaluate a specific physical-layer security scheme, i.e. orthogonal blinding, under multiple eavesdropper settings. We further propose a practical "ciphertext-only attack" that allows eavesdroppers to recover the original message by exploiting the low entropy fields in wireless packets. By means of simulation, we are able to reduce the symbol error rate (SER) at an eavesdropper below 1% using only the eavesdropper's receiving data and a general knowledge about the format of the wireless packets.

Solutions for Mitigating Cybersecurity Risks Caused by Legacy Software in Medical Devices: A Scoping Review

“…Steinmetzer et al [38] and Zheng et. al [43] provide a multi-antenna attack against a different selective jamming technique, called orthogonal blinding.…”

Demo

“…For instance, the training of the adaptive filter can converge faster when exploiting the similarity of adjacent subcarriers in an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system [5]. Moreover, instead of only exploiting known plaintext, an attack on orthogonal blinding can also guess the content of low entropy fields in wireless packets, thus enabling ciphertext-only attacks [6].…”