Teaching Your Wireless Card New Tricks: Smartphone Performance and Security Enhancements Through Wi-Fi Firmware Modifications

Smartphones come with a variety of sensors and communication interfaces, which make them perfect candidates for mobile communication testbeds. Nevertheless, proprietary firmwares hinder us from accessing the full capabilities of the underlying hardware platform which impedes innovation. Focusing on FullMAC Wi-Fi chips, we present Nexmon, a C-based firmware modification framework. It gives access to raw Wi-Fi frames and advanced capabilities that we found by reverse engineering chips and their firmware. As firmware modifications pose security risks, we discuss how to secure firmware handling without impeding experimentation on Wi-Fi chips. To present and evaluate our findings in the field, we developed the following applications. We start by presenting a ping-offloading application that handles ping requests in the firmware instead of the operating system. It significantly reduces energy consumption and processing delays. Then, we present a software-defined wireless networking application that enhances scalable video streaming by setting flow-based requirements on physical-layer parameters. As security application, we present a reactive Wi-Fi jammer that analyses incoming frames during reception and transmits arbitrary jamming waveforms by operating Wi-Fi chips as software-defined radios (SDRs). We further introduce an acknowledging jammer to ensure the flow of non-targeted frames and an adaptive power-control jammer to adjust transmission powers based on measured jamming successes. Additionally, we discovered how to extract channel state information (CSI) on a per-frame basis. Using both SDR and CSI-extraction capabilities, we present a physical-layer covert channel. It hides covert symbols in phase changes of selected OFDM subcarriers. Those manipulations can be extracted from CSI measurements at a receiver. To ease the analysis of firmware binaries, we created a debugging application that supports single stepping and runs as firmware patch on the Wi-Fi chip. We published the source code of our framework and our applications to ensure reproducibility of our results and to enable other researchers to extend our work. Our framework and the applications emphasize the need for freely modifiable firmware and detailed hardware documentation to create novel and exciting applications on commercial off-the-shelf devices

A Game of One/Two Strategic Friendly Jammers Versus a Malicious Strategic Node

We present a game-theoretic analysis of the interaction between a malicious node, attempting to perform unauthorized radio transmission, and friendly jammers trying to disrupt the malicious communications. We investigate the strategic behavior of the jammers against a rational malicious node and highlight counterintuitive results for this conflict. We also analyze the impact of multiple friendly jammers sharing the same goal but acting without coordination; we find out that this scenario offers a better payoff for the jammers, which has some strong implications on how to implement friendly jamming

Performance and Security Enhancements in Practical Millimeter-Wave Communication Systems

Millimeter-wave (mm-wave) communication systems achieve extremely high data rates and provide interference-free transmissions. to overcome high attenuations, they employ directional antennas that focus their energy in the intended direction. Transmissions can be steered such that signals only propagate within a specific area-of-interest. Although these advantages are well-known, they are not yet available in practical networks. IEEE 802.11ad, the recent standard for communications in the unlicensed 60 GHz band, exploits a subset of the directional propagation effects only. Despite the large available spectrum, it does not outperform other developments in the prevalent sub-6 GHz bands. This underutilization of directional communications causes unnecessary performance limitations and leaves a false sense of security. For example, standard compliant beam training is very time consuming. It uses suboptimal beam patterns, and is unprotected against malicious behaviors. Furthermore, no suitable research platform exists to validate protocols in realistic environments. To address these challenges, we develop a holistic evaluation framework and enhance the performance and security in practical mm-wave communication systems. Besides signal propagation analyses and environment simulations, our framework enables practical testbed experiments with off-the-shelf devices. We provide full access to a tri-band router’s operating system, modify the beam training operation in the Wi-Fi firmware, and create arbitrary beam patterns with the integrated antenna array. This novel approach allows us to implement custom algorithms such as a compressive sector selection that reduces the beam training overhead by a factor of 2.3. By aligning the receive beam, our adaptive beam switching algorithm mitigates interference from lateral directions and achieves throughput gains of up to 60%. With adaptive beam optimization, we estimate the current channel conditions and generate directional beams that implicitly exploit potential reflections in the environment. These beams increase the received signal strength by about 4.4 dB. While intercepting a directional link is assumed to be challenging, our experimental studies show that reflections on small-scale objects are sufficient to enable eavesdropping from afar. Additionally, we practically demonstrate that injecting forged feedback in the beam training enables Man-in-the Middle attacks. With only 7.3% overhead, our authentication scheme protects against this beam stealing and enforces responses to be only accepted from legitimate devices. By making beam training more efficient, effective, and reliable, our contributions finally enable practical applications of highly directional transmissions

Metamaterials and Metasurfaces

Ye

Efficiency and Sustainability of the Distributed Renewable Hybrid Power Systems Based on the Energy Internet, Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts-Volume II

The climate changes that are becoming visible today are a challenge for the global research community. In this context, renewable energy sources, fuel cell systems, and other energy generating sources must be optimally combined and connected to the grid system using advanced energy transaction methods. As this reprint presents the latest solutions in the implementation of fuel cell and renewable energy in mobile and stationary applications, such as hybrid and microgrid power systems based on the Energy Internet, Blockchain technology, and smart contracts, we hope that they will be of interest to readers working in the related fields mentioned above

DRONE DELIVERY OF CBNRECy – DEW WEAPONS Emerging Threats of Mini-Weapons of Mass Destruction and Disruption (WMDD)

Drone Delivery of CBNRECy – DEW Weapons: Emerging Threats of Mini-Weapons of Mass Destruction and Disruption (WMDD) is our sixth textbook in a series covering the world of UASs and UUVs. Our textbook takes on a whole new purview for UAS / CUAS/ UUV (drones) – how they can be used to deploy Weapons of Mass Destruction and Deception against CBRNE and civilian targets of opportunity. We are concerned with the future use of these inexpensive devices and their availability to maleficent actors. Our work suggests that UASs in air and underwater UUVs will be the future of military and civilian terrorist operations. UAS / UUVs can deliver a huge punch for a low investment and minimize human casualties.https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1046/thumbnail.jp

Modelling, Dimensioning and Optimization of 5G Communication Networks, Resources and Services

This reprint aims to collect state-of-the-art research contributions that address challenges in the emerging 5G networks design, dimensioning and optimization. Designing, dimensioning and optimization of communication networks resources and services have been an inseparable part of telecom network development. The latter must convey a large volume of traffic, providing service to traffic streams with highly differentiated requirements in terms of bit-rate and service time, required quality of service and quality of experience parameters. Such a communication infrastructure presents many important challenges, such as the study of necessary multi-layer cooperation, new protocols, performance evaluation of different network parts, low layer network design, network management and security issues, and new technologies in general, which will be discussed in this book

Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the Cyber Domain

Unmanned Aircraft Systems are an integral part of the US national critical infrastructure. The authors have endeavored to bring a breadth and quality of information to the reader that is unparalleled in the unclassified sphere. This textbook will fully immerse and engage the reader / student in the cyber-security considerations of this rapidly emerging technology that we know as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). The first edition topics covered National Airspace (NAS) policy issues, information security (INFOSEC), UAS vulnerabilities in key systems (Sense and Avoid / SCADA), navigation and collision avoidance systems, stealth design, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms; weapons systems security; electronic warfare considerations; data-links, jamming, operational vulnerabilities and still-emerging political scenarios that affect US military / commercial decisions. This second edition discusses state-of-the-art technology issues facing US UAS designers. It focuses on counter unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS) – especially research designed to mitigate and terminate threats by SWARMS. Topics include high-altitude platforms (HAPS) for wireless communications; C-UAS and large scale threats; acoustic countermeasures against SWARMS and building an Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) acoustic library; updates to the legal / regulatory landscape; UAS proliferation along the Chinese New Silk Road Sea / Land routes; and ethics in this new age of autonomous systems and artificial intelligence (AI).https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1027/thumbnail.jp