An Opportunistic Error Correction Layer for OFDM Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel cross layer scheme to lower power\ud consumption of ADCs in OFDM systems, which is based on resolution\ud adaptive ADCs and Fountain codes. The key part in the new proposed\ud system is that the dynamic range of ADCs can be reduced by\ud discarding the packets which are transmitted over 'bad' sub\ud carriers. Correspondingly, the power consumption in ADCs can be\ud reduced. Also, the new system does not process all the packets but\ud only processes surviving packets. This new error correction layer\ud does not require perfect channel knowledge, so it can be used in a\ud realistic system where the channel is estimated. With this new\ud approach, more than 70% of the energy consumption in the ADC can be\ud saved compared with the conventional IEEE 802.11a WLAN system under\ud the same channel conditions and throughput. The ADC in a receiver\ud can consume up to 50% of the total baseband energy. Moreover, to\ud reduce the overhead of Fountain codes, we apply message passing and\ud Gaussian elimination in the decoder. In this way, the overhead is\ud 3% for a small block size (i.e. 500 packets). Using both methods\ud results in an efficient system with low delay

A Framework for Evaluating Security in the Presence of Signal Injection Attacks

Sensors are embedded in security-critical applications from medical devices to nuclear power plants, but their outputs can be spoofed through electromagnetic and other types of signals transmitted by attackers at a distance. To address the lack of a unifying framework for evaluating the effects of such transmissions, we introduce a system and threat model for signal injection attacks. We further define the concepts of existential, selective, and universal security, which address attacker goals from mere disruptions of the sensor readings to precise waveform injections. Moreover, we introduce an algorithm which allows circuit designers to concretely calculate the security level of real systems. Finally, we apply our definitions and algorithm in practice using measurements of injections against a smartphone microphone, and analyze the demodulation characteristics of commercial Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs). Overall, our work highlights the importance of evaluating the susceptibility of systems against signal injection attacks, and introduces both the terminology and the methodology to do so.Comment: This article is the extended technical report version of the paper presented at ESORICS 2019, 24th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), Luxembourg, Luxembourg, September 201

From Theory to Practice: Sub-Nyquist Sampling of Sparse Wideband Analog Signals

Conventional sub-Nyquist sampling methods for analog signals exploit prior information about the spectral support. In this paper, we consider the challenging problem of blind sub-Nyquist sampling of multiband signals, whose unknown frequency support occupies only a small portion of a wide spectrum. Our primary design goals are efficient hardware implementation and low computational load on the supporting digital processing. We propose a system, named the modulated wideband converter, which first multiplies the analog signal by a bank of periodic waveforms. The product is then lowpass filtered and sampled uniformly at a low rate, which is orders of magnitude smaller than Nyquist. Perfect recovery from the proposed samples is achieved under certain necessary and sufficient conditions. We also develop a digital architecture, which allows either reconstruction of the analog input, or processing of any band of interest at a low rate, that is, without interpolating to the high Nyquist rate. Numerical simulations demonstrate many engineering aspects: robustness to noise and mismodeling, potential hardware simplifications, realtime performance for signals with time-varying support and stability to quantization effects. We compare our system with two previous approaches: periodic nonuniform sampling, which is bandwidth limited by existing hardware devices, and the random demodulator, which is restricted to discrete multitone signals and has a high computational load. In the broader context of Nyquist sampling, our scheme has the potential to break through the bandwidth barrier of state-of-the-art analog conversion technologies such as interleaved converters.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, to appear in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, the special issue on Compressed Sensin