TY - GEN
T1 - Demo abstract: CLoRa-A covert channel over LoRa PHY
AU - Hou, Ningning
AU - Zheng, Yuanqing
N1 - Funding Information:
Covert channel communication range. We aim to explore the effective communication range of covert channel in this experiment. Since we use AM modulation, the degree of amplitude variation influences communication range. We use modulation depth (D) to represent signal variations of carrier waves. We define 0 < D < 1 as D = M/A, where M is the modulation amplitude (i.e., peak-to-peak changes) and A is the original carrier amplitude. A larger D indicates a larger change of amplitude thus a higher SNR for covert channel. In our experiment, we observe that the communication distance between Alice and Carol is around 250 m when D=0.3. We can further increase the communication range of covert channel by increasing D. However, a larger D decreases the SNR of regular LoRa communication. We leave this for future work. IV. CONCLUSION This work investigates the vulnerability of LoRa PHY. We demonstrate the feasibility of building a covert channel by implementing CLoRa. CLoRa embeds covert information into LoRa packets by changing the amplitude of LoRa chirps while keeping the frequency intact. Experiment shows that the covert information can be decoded with high accuracy at a distance of 250 m. Our work is a pilot work which reveals the security vulnerability of LoRa PHY and LoRaWAN deployment. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work is supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China under grant 61702437 and Hong Kong GRF under grant PolyU 152165/19E. Yuanqing Zheng is the corresponding author.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 IEEE.
PY - 2020/7
Y1 - 2020/7
N2 - LoRa adopts a unique modulation scheme (chirp spread spectrum (CSS)) to enable long range communication at low power consumption. CSS uses the initial frequencies of LoRa chirps to differentiate LoRa symbols, while simply ignoring other RF parameters (e.g., amplitude and phase). Driven by this observation, we build a covert channel (named CLoRa) by embedding covert information with a modulation scheme orthogonal to CSS. We implement CLoRa with a COTS LoR a node (Tx) and a low-cost receive-only SDR dongle (Rx), The experiment results show that CLoRa can send covert information over 250 m. This demo reveals that the LoRa physical layer leaves sufficient room to build a covert channel by embedding covert information with a modulation scheme orthogonal to CSS.
AB - LoRa adopts a unique modulation scheme (chirp spread spectrum (CSS)) to enable long range communication at low power consumption. CSS uses the initial frequencies of LoRa chirps to differentiate LoRa symbols, while simply ignoring other RF parameters (e.g., amplitude and phase). Driven by this observation, we build a covert channel (named CLoRa) by embedding covert information with a modulation scheme orthogonal to CSS. We implement CLoRa with a COTS LoR a node (Tx) and a low-cost receive-only SDR dongle (Rx), The experiment results show that CLoRa can send covert information over 250 m. This demo reveals that the LoRa physical layer leaves sufficient room to build a covert channel by embedding covert information with a modulation scheme orthogonal to CSS.
KW - Cover channel; LoRa
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85091505274&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/INFOCOMWKSHPS50562.2020.9163002
DO - 10.1109/INFOCOMWKSHPS50562.2020.9163002
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85091505274
T3 - IEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops, INFOCOM WKSHPS 2020
SP - 1288
EP - 1289
BT - IEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops, INFOCOM WKSHPS 2020
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2020 IEEE INFOCOM Conference on Computer Communications Workshops, INFOCOM WKSHPS 2020
Y2 - 6 July 2020 through 9 July 2020
ER -