Abstract
Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have continued to grow in recent years. Nowadays, people rely on these ubiquitous smart devices and carry them everywhere in their daily lives. Acoustic signal, as a simple and prevalent transmitting vector for end-to-end communication, shows unique characteristics comparing with another popular communication method, i.e., optical signal, especially on the applications performed over smart devices. Acoustic signal does not require line-of-sight when transmission, the computational power of most smart devices are sufficient to modulate/demodulate acoustic signal using software acoustic modem only, which can be easily deployed on current off-the-shelf smart devices. Therefore, many acoustics-based short range communication systems have been developed and are used in sensitive applications such as building access control and mobile payment system. However, past work shows that an acoustic eavesdropper snooping on the communication between a transmitter and its legitimate receiver can easily break their communication protocol and decode the transmitted information. To solve this problem, many solutions have been proposed to protect the acoustic signal against eavesdroppers. In this overview, we explore the designs of existing solutions, the corresponding implementations, and their methodologies to protect acoustic signal communication. For each dependable and secure acoustics-based short range communication system, we present the major technical hurdles to be overcome, the state-of-the-art, and also offer a vision of the future research issues on this promising technology.
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This work is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (No. CNS-1421903)
CHEN Si received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from State University of New York at Buffalo. He is a member of the Ubiquitous Security and Privacy Research Laboratory (UbiSeC Lab). He is now an assistant professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include cyber-physical system security and mobile crowd-sensing system. (Email: schen@wcupa.edu)
QIN Zhan is currently working toward his Ph.D. degree at the Ubiquitous Security and Privacy Research Laboratory (UbiSeC) in the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research interests are in the areas of cloud computing and security, with focus on differential privacy data collection and publication, cybersecurity in smart grid. He is a student member of the IEEE, IEEE COMSOC, and ACM. (Email: zhanqin@buffalo.edu) University in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Prior to joining MSU, he was an assistant professor of computer science at the City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include wireless sensor networks, mobile computing, and networked embedded systems. (Email: glxing@cse.msu.edu)
REN Kui [corresponding author] is a professor of computer science and engineering and the director of UbiSeC Lab at State University of New York at Buffalo (UB). He received his Ph.D. degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Kui’s current research interest spans cloud & outsourcing security, wireless & wearable systems security, and mobile sensing & crowdsourcing. His research has been supported by NSF, DoE, AFRL, MSR, and Amazon. He received UB Exceptional Scholar Award for Sustained Achievement in 2016, UB SEAS Senior Researcher of the Year Award in 2015, Sigma Xi/IIT Research Excellence Award in 2012, and NSF CAREER Award in 2011. He has published 170 peer-review journal and conference papers and received several Best Paper Awards including IEEE ICNP 2011. He currently serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Wireless Communications, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, and IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. Kui is a fellow of IEEE, a distinguished lecturer of IEEE, a member of ACM, and a past board member of Internet Privacy Task Force, State of Illinois. (Email: kuiren@buffalo.edu)
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Chen, S., Qin, Z., Xing, G. et al. Securing acoustics-based short-range communication systems: an overview. J. Commun. Inf. Netw. 1, 44–51 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03391579
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03391579