Visible to the public Ghostbuster: Detecting the Presence of Hidden Eavesdroppers

TitleGhostbuster: Detecting the Presence of Hidden Eavesdroppers
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsChaman, Anadi, Wang, Jiaming, Sun, Jiachen, Hassanieh, Haitham, Roy Choudhury, Romit
Conference NameProceedings of the 24th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-5903-0
Keywordseavesdropper, Human Behavior, Metrics, policy-based governance, pubcrawl, resilience, security, security weaknesses, Wireless
AbstractThis paper explores the possibility of detecting the hidden presence of wireless eavesdroppers. Such eavesdroppers employ passive receivers that only listen and never transmit any signals making them very hard to detect. In this paper, we show that even passive receivers leak RF signals on the wireless medium. This RF leakage, however, is extremely weak and buried under noise and other transmitted signals that can be 3-5 orders of magnitude larger. Hence, it is missed by today's radios. We design and build Ghostbuster, the first device that can reliably extract this leakage, even when it is buried under ongoing transmissions, in order to detect the hidden presence of eavesdroppers. Ghostbuster does not require any modifications to current transmitters and receivers and can accurately detect the eavesdropper in the presence of ongoing transmissions. Empirical results show that Ghostbuster can detect eavesdroppers with more than 95% accuracy up to 5 meters away.
URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3241539.3241580
DOI10.1145/3241539.3241580
Citation Keychaman_ghostbuster:_2018