Publication: SmartLED: Smartphone-based covert channels leveraging the notification LED
Loading...
Identifiers
Publication date
2020-12-29
Defense date
Advisors
Tutors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IEEE
Impact
Export
Abstract
The widespread adoption of smartphones make them essential in daily routines. Thus, they can be used to create a covert channel without raising suspicions. To avoid detection, networkless communications are preferred. In this paper, we propose SmartLED, a mechanism to build covert channels leveraging a widely available smartphone feature - its notification LED. The secret is encoded through LED blinks using Manhattan encoding. SmartLED is assessed in real-world indoor and outdoor scenarios, considering different distances up to 5 meters. Our results show that the best performance is achieved in dark settings - 34.8 s. are needed to exfiltrate a 7-byte password to a distance of 1 m. Remarkably, distance does not cause a great impact on effective transmission time and shorter blinks do not lead to substantially greater transmission errors
Description
Keywords
smartphone, covert communication, covert channel, notification led
Bibliographic citation
L. Gonzalez-Manzano, S. Bernardez and J. M. de Fuentes, "SmartLED: Smartphone-Based Covert Channels Leveraging the Notification LED," 2020 IEEE 19th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), 2020, pp. 1748-1755, doi: 10.1109/TrustCom50675.2020.00240.