LOW-LEVEL SECURITY FOR RADIO CHIPS.
Wireless communications has become ubiquitous in the last 20 years, and plays a fundamental role for technology such as the Internet of Things (e.g., Zigbee, Bluetooth, LoRaWAN, 4G and 5G). In spite of this recognized importance, physical-layer security aspects of wireless communications are often overlooked, and require expert knowledge in the areas of wireless engineering and cybersecurity.
Low-Level Security for Radio Chips. The Physical Layer in wireless communications is commonly implemented by firmware of radio chips for performance reasons. That means that security relevant aspects of communications such as signal and message manipulations, wormhole and relay attacks, or jamming cannot be directly observed by the user. In our work, we investigate both feasibility of related attacks, and countermeasures to detect such attacks. We leverage lowlevel reverse-engineering and instrumentation of APIs and radio firmware to achieve that goal.