Leveraging AI to Compromise IoT Device Privacy by Exploiting Hardware Imperfections

Mirza Athar Baig;Asif Iqbal;Muhammad Naveed Aman;Biplab Sikdar
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Abstract

The constrained design, remote deployment, and sensitive data generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices make them susceptible to various cyberattacks. One such attack is profiling IoT devices by tracking their packet transmissions. While existing methods mitigate these attacks using pseudonymous identities, we propose a novel attack strategy that exploits the physical layer characteristics of IoT devices. Specifically, we demonstrate how an attacker can leverage features extracted from device transmissions to identify packets originating from the same device. Once identified, the attacker can isolate the device's signals and potentially determine its physical location. This attack exploits the fact that microcontroller clock variations exist across devices, even within the same model line. By extracting transmission features and training machine learning (ML) models, we accurately identify the originating device of the packets. This study reveals inherent privacy vulnerabilities in IoT systems due to hardware imperfections that are beyond user control. These limitations have profound implications for the design of security frameworks in emerging ubiquitous sensing environments. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed attack achieves 99% accuracy in real-world settings and can bypass privacy measures implemented at higher protocol layers. This work highlights the urgent need for privacy protection strategies across multiple layers of the IoT protocol stack.
利用人工智能利用硬件缺陷来损害物联网设备隐私
物联网(IoT)设备的受限设计、远程部署以及产生的敏感数据使其容易受到各种网络攻击。其中一种攻击是通过跟踪数据包传输来分析物联网设备。虽然现有方法使用假名身份减轻这些攻击,但我们提出了一种利用物联网设备物理层特征的新型攻击策略。具体来说,我们演示了攻击者如何利用从设备传输中提取的特征来识别来自同一设备的数据包。一旦被识别,攻击者就可以隔离设备的信号,并有可能确定其物理位置。这种攻击利用了这样一个事实,即微控制器时钟变化存在于设备之间,甚至在同一型号线内。通过提取传输特征和训练机器学习(ML)模型,我们可以准确地识别数据包的原始设备。这项研究揭示了物联网系统中固有的隐私漏洞,这是由于用户无法控制的硬件缺陷造成的。这些限制对在新兴的无处不在的传感环境中设计安全框架具有深远的影响。我们的实验表明,所提出的攻击在现实环境中达到99%的准确率,并且可以绕过在更高协议层实现的隐私措施。这项工作强调了对跨物联网协议栈多层隐私保护策略的迫切需要。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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CiteScore
7.70
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