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."
But for the technique to work, the MIT team's system required knowledge of certain physical parameters, such as the transmission's frequency and modulation type, in advance.
Building on this development, the team at Princeton used a similar method to detect the surface vibrations, but developed new algorithms that capitalize on the differences between radar and sonar to uncover those physical parameters. That allowed the researchers to decode the message without cooperation from the underwater transmitter.
Using an inexpensive commercial drone and radar, the researchers tested their method in a swimming pool. The researchers deployed a speaker under the water and, as swimmers provided interference, flew a drone over the surface. The drone repeatedly sent brief radar chirps toward the water.
When the radar signals bounced off the water's surface, they revealed the pattern of vibrations from the sound waves for the system to detect and decode.
The researchers also used a boom-mounted radar for tests in a real-world environment at Carnegie Lake in Princeton. They found that the system could figure out the unknown parameters and decode messages from the speaker, even with interference from wind and waves. In fact, it could determine the modulation type, one of the most important parameters, with 97.58% accuracy.
(Score: 2) by corey on Monday November 25, @01:54AM (3 children)
> 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.
I haven’t heard of open broadcast, analog, unencrypted communications that anyone would want to keep secure. Sonar is easy to hear underwater, so that may be better to hear from above. But they say they are raising awareness to a problem I don’t think security or defence services have. Underwater comms is usually LF using big long dragline antennas. And that’d all be encrypted.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday November 25, @02:16AM
Yeah, i was thinking encrypted and with 'padding': false 'vibrations' to create more 'fuzz' to make de-encryption harder.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 25, @03:58PM (1 child)
And here I was thinking it could be used for listening to marine life.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Monday November 25, @10:38PM
Those animals better start encoding their communications!