Cross-Medium Eavesdropping Technology Overturns Assumptions About Underwater Communications Security
taylorvich writes:
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-11-medium-eavesdropping-technology-overturns-assumptions.html
Researchers from Princeton and MIT have found a way to intercept underwater messages from the air, overturning long held assumptions about the security of underwater transmissions.
The team created a device that uses radar to eavesdrop on underwater acoustic signals, or sonar, by decoding the tiny vibrations those signals create on the water's surface. In principle, the technique could also roughly identify the location of an underwater transmitter, the researchers said.
In a paper presented at ACM MobiCom on November 20, the researchers detailed the new eavesdropping technology and offered ways to guard against the attacks it enables. They demonstrated the capability on Lake Carnegie, a small artificial lake in Princeton. Applying the technology in the open ocean would be significantly more challenging, but the researchers said they believed it would be possible with significant engineering improvements.
The researchers said their intention is not only to alert people to the vulnerability of underwater transmissions, but also to detail methods that can be used to prevent interceptions.
[...] In 2018, the MIT group realized that the impact of the sound waves on the water's surface leaves a sort of fingerprint of tiny vibrations that correspond to the underwater signal. The team used a radar mounted on a drone to read the surface vibrations and deployed algorithms to detect the pattern, decode the signal and extract the message.
"Underwater-to-air communications is one of the most difficult long-standing problems in our field," said Fadel Adib, associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and co-author on the new paper.
"It was exciting-and surprising-to see our method succeed in decoding underwater messages from the tiny vibrations they caused on the surface."
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