Unsupervised Wireless Diarization: A Potential New Attack on Encrypted Wireless Networks

C. Nicolas Barati, Bishal Lamichhane, Siyu Liao, Eric Graves, Ananthram Swami, Ashutosh Sabharwal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We present a new threat model enabling a passive adversary to infer which overheard packets belong to which transmitters. We call this threat model unsupervised wireless diarization (UWD) where the adversary assigns transmitter identity (label) to received packets in an encrypted wireless network without access to the MAC headers. To demonstrate the feasibility of such an attack, we develop UWDNet, a wireless diarization pipeline comprised of a Siamese neural network to extract embeddings from received packets, a similarity metric to compare embeddings, and unsupervised clustering. We evaluate UWDNet on both synthetic datasets and datasets of real wireless transmissions collected using Rice University's configurable massive MIMO testbed RENEW. Via various experimentation scenarios, our initial results show that UWDNet achieves a diarization accuracy of above 90% on synthetic data of transmitters it has never seen. To push the limits of performance evaluation, we collected a real radio transmissions dataset representing a worst-case (almost pathological) setting where all nodes are co-located. Even in this near-pathological case, UWDNet accuracy is > 60% - well above a random label assignment, indicating the feasibility of unsupervised wireless diarization in real-life scenarios. We also analyzed different factors such as the spatial channel and transmit parameters, which impact diarization accuracy in real-world scenarios.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationICC 2023 - IEEE International Conference on Communications
Subtitle of host publicationSustainable Communications for Renaissance
EditorsMichele Zorzi, Meixia Tao, Walid Saad
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages2312-2318
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781538674628
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event2023 IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2023 - Rome, Italy
Duration: May 28 2023Jun 1 2023

Publication series

NameIEEE International Conference on Communications
Volume2023-May
ISSN (Print)1550-3607

Conference

Conference2023 IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2023
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityRome
Period5/28/236/1/23

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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