SaTC: CORE: Small: URadio: Towards Secure Smart Home IoT Communication Using Hybrid Ultrasonic-RF Radio

Sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (Awards # CNS-1817029, CNS-1950171)
Duration: 9/1/2018-8/31/2023

Welcome to the web page of our research project: "SaTC: CORE: Small: URadio: Towards Secure Smart Home IoT Communication Using Hybrid Ultrasonic-RF Radio". This website is created and maintained to disseminate and share research results and other information related to the project.

Project Description

Recent years have seen the explosion of smart home Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and platforms, underscoring the need to address security and privacy of smart home communications. The demand for IoT devices (e.g., smart speakers, locks, and activity trackers) is occurring while radio spectrum, a necessary ingredient for wireless service, becomes increasingly scarce. As a result, multiple wireless technologies coexist and compete for spectrum resources, resulting in degraded spectrum efficiency and security. This project aims to enhance the reliability and security of smart home networks by leveraging the security and energy efficiency properties of ultrasonic communication, and by integrating them with radio-frequency technology. The success of this project will result in a new communication system that can provide secure and reliable communication on two different types of spectrum - radio-frequency and ultrasound - to help alleviate the crowded radio frequency spectrum and prevent aggregated security attacks. The proposed project aims to significantly improve the security of smart home networks, and will also have a positive impact on education through the creation of new wireless security course projects and modules; provision of research training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students of underrepresented groups; and broad dissemination of project results through high-profile tutorials, talks, publications, software tool kits, and open-source sites.

The goal of this project is to develop novel, practical and foundational solutions to secure smart home IoT networks. The research focuses on the following objectives: 1) Develop and assess the performance of a hybrid ultrasound/radio-frequency transceiver using a wideband ultrasonic transducer to enable secure and reliable IoT communication by leveraging phased acoustic array technology; 2) Ensure the robustness of IoT communications by developing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference cancellation and directional ultrasonic anti-jamming communication technologies; and 3) Design a location-restricted device authentication mechanism without the reliance on credentials by leveraging signal features of the ambient radio-frequency and ultrasonic signals, aiming for for immediate and trustworthy authentication of IoT devices. The proposed solution will be tested using large-scale simulations and experimentally tested via software-defined radio testbeds and ultrasonic radio prototypes. The project pursues advances in our understanding of security in smart home IoT networks, thereby providing guidance on the design of next-generation smart home systems.

Personnel

Principal Investigators

Dr. Qiben Yan (PI) Assitant Professor Department of Computer Science and Engineering Michigan State University Homepage: http://cse.msu.edu/~qyan/

Post-doc Researchers

Kehai Liu Post-doc associate Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Graduate Students

	Guangjing Wang Michigan State University
	Hanqing Guo Michigan State University
	Jianzhi Lou Michigan State University
	Qi Xia University of Nebraska, Lincoln
	Yuanda Wang Michigan State University
	Ying Zhu Michigan State University

Undergraduate Students

	Shane Patrarungrong Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
	Eshan Dixit Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
	Adam Kasumovic Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI

Publications

• A Practical Survey on Emerging Threats from AI-driven Voice Attacks: How Vulnerable are Commercial Voice Control Systems
  Yuanda Wang, Qiben Yan, Nikolay Ivanov, Xun Chen
  Arxiv Preprint 2024. [BibTex]
• MASTERKEY: Practical Backdoor Attack Against Speaker Verification Systems
  Hanqing Guo, Xun Chen, Junfeng Guo, Li Xiao, and Qiben Yan
  ACM MobiCom 2023 , October 2-6, 2023. Madrid, Spain. Website [BibTex]
• PhantomSound: Black-Box, Query-Efficient Audio Adversarial Attack via Split-Second Phoneme Injection
  Hanqing Guo, Guangjing Wang, Yuanda Wang, Bocheng Chen, Qiben Yan, and Li Xiao
  The 26th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2023) , October, 2023. Hong Kong. [BibTex]
(Acceptance ratio: 23.5%)
• VSMask: Defending Against Voice Synthesis Attack via Real-Time Predictive Perturbation
  Yuanda Wang, Hanqing Guo, Guangjing Wang, Bocheng Chen, and Qiben Yan
  16th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (ACM WiSec), May, 2023. Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom. [BibTex]
• SpecPatch: Human-In-The-Loop Adversarial Audio Spectrogram Patch Attack on Speech Recognition
  Hanqing Guo, Yuanda Wang, Nikolay Ivanov, Li Xiao, Qiben Yan
  ACM CCS 2022, July, 2022. Website [BibTex] Best Paper Honorable Mention Award
• GhostTalk: Interactive Attack on Smartphone Voice System Through Power Line
  Yuanda Wang, Hanqing Guo, and Qiben Yan
  NDSS Symposium 2022 , San Diego, CA, USA, Feb. 27 - Mar. 3, 2022. Website [BibTex]
• NEC: Speaker Selective Cancellation via Neural Enhanced Ultrasound Shadowing
  Hanqing Guo, Chenning Li, Lingkun Li, Zhichao Cao, Qiben Yan, Li Xiao
  2022 52nd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), June 27 - June 30, 2022. [BibTex]
(Acceptance ratio: 49/262=18.7%)
• SUPERVOICE: Text-Independent Speaker Verification Using Ultrasound Energy in Human Speech
  Hanqing Guo, Qiben Yan, Nikolay Ivanov, Ying Zhu, Li Xiao, Eric J. Hunter
  ACM AsiaCCS 2022, May 30 - June 3, 2022. [BibTex]
(Acceptance ratio: 18.4%)
• URadio: Wideband Ultrasound Communication for Smart Home Applications
  Qiben Yan, Qi Xia, Yuanda Wang, Pan Zhou, Huacheng Zeng
  IEEE Internet of Things Journal, January, 2022. [BibTex]
• AuthIoT: A Transferable Wireless Authentication Scheme for IoT Devices without Input Interface
  Shichen Zhang, Pedram Kheirkhah Sangdeh, Hossein Pirayesh, Huacheng Zeng, Qiben Yan, Kai Zeng
  IEEE Internet of Things Journal, June, 2022.
• SoundFence: Securing Ultrasonic Sensors in Vehicles Using Physical-Layer Defense
  Jianzhi Lou, Qiben Yan, Qing Hui, and Huacheng Zeng
  IEEE SECON 2021
  Virtual Conference, July 6 - July 9, 2021.
(Acceptance ratio: 26.4 %)
• JammingBird: Jamming-Resilient Communications for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
  Hossein Pirayesh, Pedram Kheirkhah Sangdeh, Shichen Zhang, Qiben Yan, and Huacheng Zeng
  IEEE SECON 2021
  Virtual Conference, July 6 - July 9, 2021.
(Acceptance ratio: 26.4 %)
• UD-MIMO: Uplink Distributed MIMO for Wireless LANs
  Hossein Pirayesh, Pedram Kheirkhah Sangdeh, Qiben Yan, and Huacheng Zeng
  IEEE SECON 2021
  Virtual Conference, July 6 - July 9, 2021. Best Paper Award
(Acceptance ratio: 26.4 %)
• DM-COM: Combining Device-to-Device and MU-MIMO Communications for Cellular Networks
  Pedram Kheirkhah Sangdeh, Hossein Pirayesh, Qiben Yan, and Huacheng Zeng
  IEEE Internet of Things Journal
  March, 2021.
• SDR Receiver Using Commodity WiFi via Physical-Layer Signal Reconstruction
  Woojae Jeong, Jinhwan Jung, Yuanda Wang, Shuai Wang, Seokwon Yang, Qiben Yan, Yung Yi, Song Min Kim
  International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom 2020)
  London, United Kingdom, September 21-25, 2020. [BibTex]
(Acceptance ratio: 16.1%)
• SurfingAttack: Interactive Hidden Attack on Voice Assistants Using Ultrasonic Guided Wave
  Qiben Yan, Kehai Liu, Qin Zhou, Hanqing Guo, and Ning Zhang
  NDSS 2020
  San Diego, CA, USA, Feb. 23-26, 2020.
Project Website (Acceptance ratio: 88/506=17.4%)

News

1. New Scientist, ACM TechNews
2. Scientific American, Science Daily, Futurity, BBC Radio, Forbes, Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, FastCompany, Hackster, Techworm, CISOMAG, Android Authority, ACM TechNews, Security Affairs, The Register, Extreme Tech, TechXplore, Apple Insider, MediaPost, NewsBreak, Techradar, Twitter #surfingattack, MSU Engineering, MSU Today, We live security, 钛媒体, 凤凰新闻, 新浪, 腾讯, 搜狐, cnbeta, 每日头条
3. Safe house: ultrasound tech making smart homes more secure
4. Research tackles smart home security.
5. Our Vision.

Curriculum Development and Outreach

• Interviewed by the renowed media including Scientific America, BBC Radio, Popular Mechanics, and so on.
• Michigan State University: CSE 891: Cyber-Physical Systems Security (covers ultrasound and voice assistants technologies);
• Michigan State University: CSE 422: Computer Networks (covers ultrasound communication technologies);
• Michigan State University: CSE 824: Advanced Computer Networking and Communications (covers acoustic communication and ultrasound applications);
• University of Nebraska-Lincoln: CSCE 990: Mobile and Wireless Security (covers acoustic communication security, and ultrasound signal attacks);
• University of Nebraska-Lincoln: CSCE 990: Mobile and Wireless Security (covers acoustic communication security, and ultrasound signal attacks);
• University of Nebraska-Lincoln: CSCE 465/865: Wireless Communication Networks (covers acoustic communication networks).

Note: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed on this web page are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).