Where Are You From? Confusing Location Distinction Using Virtual Multipath Camouflage

Title of Lecture:

Where Are You From? Confusing Location Distinction Using Virtual Multipath Camouflage

Lecturer: Prof. Yao Liu

Time: 10:10

Date: 2017-06-14

Venue: 622 Room of School of Computer Science, Wenjin Building

Hosted by: School of Computer Science

About the Lecture:

In wireless networks, location distinction aims to detect location changes or facilitate authentication of wireless users. To achieve location distinction, recent research has been focused on investigating the spatial uncorrelation property of wireless channels. Specifically, the differences of wireless channel characteristics are used to distinguish locations or identify location changes. However, we discover a new attack against all existing location distinction approaches that are built on the spatial uncorrelation property of wireless channels. In such an attack, the adversary can easily hide her location changes or impersonate movements by injecting fake wireless channel characteristics into a target receiver. Experimental results on our USRP-based prototype show that the discovered attack can craft any desired channel characteristic with a successful probability of 95.0% to defeat spatial uncorrelation based location distinction schemes. To defend against this attack, we propose a detection technique that utilizes an auxiliary receiver or antenna to identify these fake channel characteristics. Experiments demonstrate that our novel detection method achieves a detection rate higher than 91.2% while maintaining a very low false alarm rate.  This results were published in ACM Mobicom. In this talk, I will introduce this discovered attack and the proposed defense methods.

Profile of the Lecturer:

Dr. Yao Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida. She received her Ph.D in Computer Science from North Carolina State University in 2012. Dr. Liu's research is related to computer and network security, with an emphasis on designing and implementing defense approaches that protect emerging wireless technologies from being undermined by adversaries. Her research interest also lies in the security of cyber-physical systems, especially in smart grid security. She is an NSF CAREER Award recipient in 2016.