Universal Radio Hacker: A Suite for Wireless Protocol Analysis

Abstract

With an increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices also the number of proprietary wireless protocols raised. Meanwhile manufacturers save resources wherever they can, having size and energy constraints in mind. Consequently, there are security flaws that hackers demonstrate by silently breaking in a house or stealing a car. Revealing IoT security flaws requires expertise in Digital Signal Processing (DSP), coding theory, protocol design and cryptography. We contribute a software that addresses research groups and security analysts without strong DSP and coding theoretic background: Universal Radio Hacker (URH). This software is a complete suite to investigate wireless protocols including (1) Software Defined Radio interface for sending and receiving, (2) DSP abstraction, (3) easy customizable encodings, (4) logic analysis assistance and (5) fuzzing. Using our software researchers can focus on breaking the cryptography or analyzing protocol logic without worrying about hardware configuration or DSP specifics.