Steganography in MAC Layers of 802.15.4 Protocol for Securing Wireless Sensor Networks

Martins, David; Guyennet, Hervé

doi:10.1109/mines.2010.175

Cited by 18 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…The average energy per symbol under PN-ASK can be computed as E c S = s∈Sc x · s 2 · Pr{s sent} (16) Recall that all symbols on the primary channel lies on the unit circle of the constellation diagram, thus x 2 = E s for any x ∈ S p . Furthermore, since s · x = s x and all symbols in S c are equiprobable, (16) can be rewritten as…”

Section: Energy Per Symbolmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Hiding Data in Plain Sight: Undetectable Wireless Communications Through Pseudo-Noise Asymmetric Shift Keying

DrOro

Restuccia

Melodia

2019

IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

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Undetectable wireless transmissions are fundamental to avoid eavesdroppers or censorship by authoritarian governments. To address this issue, wireless steganography "hides" covert information inside primary information by slightly modifying the transmitted waveform such that primary information will still be decodable, while covert information will be seen as noise by agnostic receivers. Since the addition of covert information inevitably decreases the SNR of the primary transmission, a key challenge in wireless steganography is to mathematically analyze and optimize the impact of the covert channel on the primary channel as a function of different channel conditions. Another core issue is to make sure that the covert channel is almost undetectable by eavesdroppers. Existing approaches are protocol-specific and thus their performance cannot be assessed and optimized in general scenarios. To address this research gap, we notice that existing wireless technologies rely on phase-keying modulations (e.g., BPSK, QPSK) that in most cases do not use the channel up to its Shannon capacity. Therefore, the residual capacity can be leveraged to implement a wireless system based on a pseudo-noise asymmetric shift keying (PN-ASK) modulation, where covert symbols are mapped by shifting the amplitude of primary symbols. This way, covert information will be undetectable, since a receiver expecting phase-modulated symbols will see their shift in amplitude as an effect of channel/path loss degradation. Through rigorous mathematical analysis, we first investigate the SER of PN-ASK as a function of the channel; then, we find the optimal PN-ASK parameters that optimize primary and covert throughput under different channel condition. We evaluate the throughput performance and undetectability of PN-ASK through extensive simulations and on an experimental testbed based on USRP N210 software-defined radios. Results indicate that PN-ASK improves the throughput by more than 8x with respect to prior art. Finally, we demonstrate through experiments that PN-ASK is able to transmit covert data on top of IEEE 802.11g frames, which are correctly decoded by an off-the-shelf laptop WiFi card without any hardware modifications.

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Section: Energy Per Symbolmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…II. RELATED WORK The application of steganography to design covert wireless communication systems has received some attention over the last few years [13][14][15][16][17]. However, only few works have focused on the design of general-purpose, efficient and undetectable covert wireless communication systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hiding Data in Plain Sight: Undetectable Wireless Communications Through Pseudo-Noise Asymmetric Shift Keying

DrOro

Restuccia

Melodia

2019

IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…RELATED WORK Wireless steganography has been frequently used for covert communications among parties. Differently from approaches where covert data are embedded in the packet control fields (e.g., checksum [32], flags [33,34], and padding fields [35], among others [36,37]), wireless steganography introduces displacements in the I/Q constellation plane that be controlled to encode information. Typical methods include frequency/phase shifts [17,23], I/Q imbalance [38], superimposing noisy constellations [16,24,39,40] or training and preamble sequences manipulations [23,41].…”

Section: B Experimental Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

SteaLTE: Private 5G Cellular Connectivity as a Service with Full-stack Wireless Steganography

Bonati

Restuccia

Basagni

et al. 2021

IEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

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Fifth-generation (5G) systems will extensively employ radio access network (RAN) softwarization. This key innovation enables the instantiation of "virtual cellular networks" running on different slices of the shared physical infrastructure. In this paper, we propose the concept of Private Cellular Connectivity as a Service (PCCaaS), where infrastructure providers deploy covert network slices known only to a subset of users. We then present SteaLTE as the first realization of a PCCaaS-enabling system for cellular networks. At its core, SteaLTE utilizes wireless steganography to disguise data as noise to adversarial receivers. Differently from previous work, however, it takes a full-stack approach to steganography, contributing an LTE-compliant steganographic protocol stack for PCCaaS-based communications, and packet schedulers and operations to embed covert data streams on top of traditional cellular traffic (primary traffic). SteaLTE balances undetectability and performance by mimicking channel impairments so that covert data waveforms are almost indistinguishable from noise. We evaluate the performance of SteaLTE on an indoor LTE-compliant testbed under different traffic profiles, distance and mobility patterns. We further test it on the outdoor PAWR POWDER platform over long-range cellular links. Results show that in most experiments SteaLTE imposes little loss of primary traffic throughput in presence of covert data transmissions (< 6%), making it suitable for undetectable PCCaaS networking.

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“…We have showed too that there are numerous possibilities to hide data in the MAC layer of the 802.15.4 protocol by using some specific fields of MAC frames (Martins and Guyennet, 2010b). We found that steganography in the MAC layer of the 802.15.4 is energy-efficient, but the size capacity of sent messages are limited and if the attacker knows the method to hide data, the data is no more protected (in the case where the data is not encrypted).…”

Section: Steganographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Security in wireless sensor networks: a survey of attacks and countermeasures

Martins

Guyennet

2011

IJSSC

Self Cite

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Wireless sensor networks are specific ad hoc networks. They are characterised by their limited computing power and energy constraints. This paper proposes a study of security in this kind of network. We show the specificities and vulnerabilities of wireless sensor networks. We present a list of current attacks, which can be found in these particular networks, and how they use their vulnerabilities. Finally, we discuss different solutions made by the scientific community to secure wireless sensor networks. He has been a Scientific Advisor for 17 theses and has published more than 90 papers. This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled 'Wireless sensor network attacks and security mechanisms -a short survey'

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Steganography in MAC Layers of 802.15.4 Protocol for Securing Wireless Sensor Networks

Cited by 18 publications

References 15 publications

Hiding Data in Plain Sight: Undetectable Wireless Communications Through Pseudo-Noise Asymmetric Shift Keying

Hiding Data in Plain Sight: Undetectable Wireless Communications Through Pseudo-Noise Asymmetric Shift Keying

SteaLTE: Private 5G Cellular Connectivity as a Service with Full-stack Wireless Steganography

Security in wireless sensor networks: a survey of attacks and countermeasures

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