Research Team Status

• Names of researchers and position 
  • Christopher Ellis (PhD Student)
     
• Any new collaborations with other universities/researchers?
  • We are working on recruiting one US citizen postdoc

Project Goals

• What is the current project goal?
  • Generalizing the IDBleed attacks: is this attack only suitable for wireless communication, or any communication pattern that exhibit unique behavior is vulnerable. We seek to uncover the essence of this attack, and wake up the community for this underlooked privacy threats. 
     
• How does the current goal factor into the long-term goal of the project?
  • The current goal is a natural extension for the IDBleed [NDSS'24] paper, which was just accepted to be published in NDSS'25.

Accomplishments

• Address whether project milestones were met. If milestones were not met, explain why, and what are the next steps.
  • In the formal verification vein, we did not meet the milestones as expected due to the graduation of Mohit Jangid. He is looking for academic job in India and did not contribute much for the protocol formal verification. However, the PI has managed to recruit one domestic Post Doctoral researcher to work on the project starting from 1/1/2025.
     
• What is the contribution to foundational cybersecurity research? Was there something discovered or confirmed?
  • The paper titled "Deanonymizing Device Identities via Side-channel Attacks in Exclusive-use IoTs & Mitigation" has been officially accepted by NDSS'25 (a top conference in cybersecurity). This paper made 3 notable contributions:
    • Novel Vulnerability. We are the first to demonstrate the vulnerability in a ubiquitous wireless communication scenario we call exclusive-use, where distinct traffic patterns at specific stages reveal trusted relationships. We focus on IoT devices and show that this fundamental and overlooked flaw can be exploited by attackers through passive observation of wireless traffic or by actively relaying or replaying packets.
    • Concrete Attacks. We confirm through protocol and real-world packet analysis that widely used wireless technologies, including BLE and Wi-Fi, are vulnerable to tracking attacks that exploit exclusive-use characteristics to deanonymize devices—an attack we introduce as IDBLEED. Further, these attacks are feasible at low-cost, leveraging protocol traffic pattern vulnerabilities without requiring sophisticated device compromise or malware.
    • Mitigation Solution. We propose a novel generalized mitigation that introduces ANONYMIZATION LAYER (AL) which supports anonymous communication between devices over broadcast channels using ephemeral identifiers, removes the need for destination addresses, and addresses the boolean side-channel leak through pseudo-communication with untrusted devices. We implement AL in C and evaluate its performance overhead on-device and observe a negligible 1.808 or 2.038% mean overhead, for PC or smartphone respectively, measured from 1.4 million packets varying
      in data size between 16 and 2048 bytes. Additionally, our key resolution method (Cache) outperforms existing
      methods by 2.5x-40.4x (PC) and 1.5x-30.8x (smartphone) performance increase, measured over 1 to 512 pairs.
       
• Impact of research
  • Internal to the university (coursework/curriculum)
    • N/A
  • External to the university (transition to industry/government (local/federal); patents, start-ups, software, etc.)
    • N/A
  • Any acknowledgements, awards, or references in media?
    • N/A

Publications and presentations

• Add publication reference in the publications section below. An authors copy or final should be added in the report file(s) section. This is for NSA's review only.
  • The camera-ready of IDBleed paper [NDSS'25] is attached
• Optionally, upload technical presentation slides that may go into greater detail. For NSA's review only.