PAGE TITLE
Physical Gate based Preamble Obfuscation for Securing Wireless Communication
PAGE SUMMARY
In wireless networks, the transmission between legitimate users can be easily overheard by an eavesdropper for interception due to the broadcast nature of wireless medium, making the transmission highly vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks. Physical layer based security has increased exponentially over the last few years mainly due to the emergence of decentralized networks and the deployment of 5G and beyond wireless communication systems. Traditional methods of providing security in such networks are impractical due to the light computational abilities of some wireless devices(such as RFID tags, certain sensors etc.) or to the very large scale or loose organizational structure of some networks. Addressing these concerns, researchers at Drexel have now developed a novel physical layer based technique for securing wireless communications by means of preamble obfuscation.
Current security methods that rely on encryption and decryption techniques to secure a transmission, reveal the sending and receiving nodes to the intruder. But Drexel’s unique technique secures the wireless communication channel through obfuscating the physical layer at the gate level logic by using unique keys that are generated individually at both the transmitter and the receiver nodes which are only known to them. These symmetric secret keys extracted on both ends of the communication channel are then used to successfully encrypt the packet preamble. The novel technique prevents intruders using standard compliant radio transceivers from performing narrow band reactive jamming and eavesdropping based attacks. The technique has been extensively tested on Drexel’s SDC testbed and results show that an intruder without the correct decryption key is unable to detect the wireless packet using standard wireless packet detectors.
APPLICATIONS
TITLE: Applications
Security against man-in-the-middle attacks
Eavesdropping attacks
Denial-of-Service attacks
Spoofing attacks
ADVANTAGES
TITLE:Advantages
Achieves perfect-secrecy data transmission among intended network nodes, while malicious nodes that eavesdrop upon the transmission obtain zero information
Has the flexibility in obfuscating the physical layer based on runtime data
Ability to apply an overlaying security layer for point-to-point communication on demand
IP STATUS
Intellectual Property and Development Status
PCT Application Pending- PCT/US2018/013728
https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2018132796&redirectedid=true
PUBLICATIONS
References
Kapil R. Dandekar, Ioannis Savidis, James Chacko, Kyle Juretus , Marko Jacovic, Cem Sahin, Nagarajan Kandasamy “Physical gate based preamble obfuscation for securing wireless communication.” (2017).
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7876142
Contact Information
Harshith Reddy
Licensing Manager
215-571-4290
harshith@drexel.edu