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In the 21st century, the security of the electromagnetic spectrum has tremendous strategic importance to society. In particular, the wireless infrastructure that carries vital services such as 5G cellular networks, communication to aircraft and Global Navigation Satellite System is especially critical. This rapid change is even more impressive considering that in the 80s the only concern for spectrum management was mostly about radio/television broadcasting and military communications. The allocation of spectrum has become over the years more and more complex with different players and stakeholders that depend on largely of their correct operation. However, today, the cost of commodity radio technology prices is so low that access to it is no longer restricted to governments and network operators. It is now affordable to individuals, giving them the potential to become malicious intruders. More frequent and more sophisticated threats from such infiltrators could wreak havoc and are among the most serious challenges faced by society. Unauthorized transmissions could threaten the operation of networks used by air traffic control systems, police, security and emergency services in populated areas. The SOCRATES (Large Scale Collaborative Detection and Location of Threats in the Electromagnetic Space, Grant G5461) project started in June 2018 and aims to deliver a security system to protect our electromagnetic environment and the services and users that depend upon it. SOCRATES will provide an accurate, autonomous, fast and secure system based on a novel and disruptive IoT (Internet of Things) architecture. By detecting and locating unusual RF signal and source activity it will identify intruders in the electromagnetic space, before a threat can become serious, learning about its physical layer features and its geographic location. By providing the capability to detect, identify and locate potential threats to electromagnetic infrastructure security, SOCRATES represents an important step in ensuring society's readiness to respond effectively to them. SOCRATES will shield economic and social structures from those who would harm them. In this contribution we present a summary of published results achieved in the first year of the project, how funds from SOCRATES have foster the collaboration between NATO countries Spain and Belgium and partner country Switzerland, including the activities led by Electrosense as partner country. ; TRUE ; pub

Today's spectrum measurements are mainly performed by governmental agencies which drive around using expensive specialized hardware. The idea of crowdsourcing spectrum monitoring has recently gained attention as an alternative way to capture the usage of wide portions of the wireless spectrum at larger geographical and time scales. To support this vision, we develop a flexible software-defined sensor architecture that enables distributed data collection in real-time over the Internet. Our sensor design builds upon low-cost commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware components with a total cost per sensor device below $100. The low-cost nature of our sensor platform makes the sensing approach particularly suitable for large-scale deployments but imposes technical challenges regarding performance and quality. To circumvent the limits of our solution, we have implemented and evaluated different sensing strategies and noise reduction techniques. Our results suggest that our sensor architecture may be useful in application areas such as dynamic spectrum access in cognitive radios, detecting regions with elevated electro-smog, or simply to gain an understanding of the spectrum usage for advanced signal intelligence such as anomaly detection or policy enforcement. ; TRUE ; pub

This open access book reports the results of a study conducted in Switzerland in 2022 to provide an overview of the changing landscape of encryption and data protection technologies and their global usage trends. The Swiss Confederation tasked the Cyber-Defence Campus (CYD Campus) to identify the 38 most relevant encryption and data protection technologies, analyze their expected evolution until 2025, and derive implications for the military, civil society, and economy sectors. Fifty experts from academia, government, and industry have contributed to this study and provided their viewpoints on the different technologies and trends. This comprehensive collection of factsheets provides a reference for organizations and individuals that need to elaborate coherent and efficient data protection and encryption strategies in the coming years. The 38 technologies have been sorted into five categories. First, encryption foundations represent the technologies used to create other encryption applications. Second, low-level applications represent the technologies that focus on micro functionalities. Third, high-level applications represent the technologies that focus on more abstract and macro functionalities. Fourth, data protection represents the technologies used to protect data without encrypting these data. Finally, use cases represent concrete ways the different technologies can be used together to create a working solution. The book serves as a guide for decision-making within administrations, government organizations, and industry. It will also be interesting for the tech-savvy board member or engineers looking to get an entry point into data protection topics. Last not least, the book will also be a valuable reading for anyone interested in data protection and encryption.

Today's radio frequency (RF) spectrum measurements are mainly performed by governmental agencies which drive around using bulky and expensive specialized hardware. This approach does not scale well, providing us with only a poor situational awareness of the actual RF spectrum usage around us. We have developed a wideband spectrum monitoring sensor for remote operation that builds upon portable and low-cost commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware components with a total cost per sensor device below $100. This results in a stunning cost reduction factor of 50 to 500 comparing to professional equipment. Our sensor platform adopts the software-defined radio paradigm and performs all signal processing steps on the CPU and GPU of a low-cost single-board computer. We address the challenges of large frequency errors and long scanning times due to the hardware constraints by proposing new correction and optimization methods, providing a satisfactory level of accuracy in indoor and outdoor environments. Our remote sensing platform is envisioned to be used at larger scale for various applications such as dynamic spectrum access in cognitive radios, detecting regions with elevated electro-smog, or for policy enforcement in the electromagnetic space. ; TRUE ; pub

Despite the Aircraft Communications, Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) being widely deployed for over twenty years, little scrutiny has been applied to it outside of the aviation community. Whilst originally utilized by commercial airlines to track their flights and provide automated timekeeping on crew, today it serves as a multi-purpose air-ground data link for many aviation stakeholders including private jet owners, state actors and military. Such a change has caused ACARS to be used far beyond its original mandate; to date no work has been undertaken to assess the extent of this especially with regard to privacy and the various stakeholder groups which use it. In this paper, we present an analysis of ACARS usage by privacy sensitive actors-military, government and business. We conduct this using data from the VHF (both traditional ACARS, and VDL mode 2) and satellite communications subnetworks. Based on more than two million ACARS messages collected over the course of 16 months, we demonstrate that current ACARS usage systematically breaches location privacy for all examined aviation stakeholder groups, explaining the types of messages used to cause this problem.We illustrate the challenges with three case studies-one for each stakeholder group-to show how much privacy sensitive information can be constructed with a handful of ACARS messages. We contextualize our findings with opinions on the issue of privacy in ACARS from 40 aviation industry professionals. From this, we explore recommendations for how to address these issues, including use of encryption and policy measures. ; ISSN:2299-0984

Attacks on behavioral biometrics have become increasingly popular. Most research has been focused on presenting a previously obtained feature vector to the biometric sensor, often by the attacker training themselves to change their behavior to match that of the victim. However, obtaining the victim's biometric information may not be easy, especially when the user's template on the authentication device is adequately secured. As such, if the authentication device is inaccessible, the attacker may have to obtain data elsewhere. In this paper, we present an analytic framework that enables us to measure how easily features can be predicted based on data gathered in a different context (e.g., different sensor, performed task or environment). This framework is used to assess how resilient individual features or entire biometrics are against such cross-context attacks. In order to be able to compare existing biometrics with regard to this property, we perform a user study to gather biometric data from 30 participants and five biometrics (ECG, eye movements, mouse movements, touchscreen dynamics and gait) in a variety of contexts. We make this dataset publicly available online. Our results show that many attack scenarios are viable in practice as features are easily predicted from a variety of contexts. All biometrics include features that are particularly predictable (e.g., amplitude features for ECG or curvature for mouse movements). Overall, we observe that cross-context attacks on eye movements, mouse movements and touchscreen inputs are comparatively easy while ECG and gait exhibit much more chaotic cross-context changes. ; This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 722022