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.
xmlui.dri2xhtml.METS-1.0.item-contributor-funder:
Comunidad de Madrid European Commission Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España) Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Sponsor:
This work was supported by MINECO grant TIN2016-79095-C2-2-R (SMOG-DEV), PID2019-111429RB-C21 (ODIO), P2018/TCS4566 (CYNAMON-CM) funded with European FEDER funds and CAVTIONS-CM-UC3M funded by UC3M and the Government of Madrid (CAM).
Project:
Gobierno de España. TIN2016-79095-C2-2-R Comunidad de Madrid. CAVTIONS-CM-UC3M Gobierno de España. PID2019-111429RB-C21 Comunidad de Madrid. P2018/TCS4566
Keywords:
smartphone
,
covert communication
,
covert channel
,
notification led
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 mechThe 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[+][-]