arXiv subjects

Richard Baker

Publications and source records attributed to Richard Baker.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

5Gone: Uplink Overshadowing Attacks in 5G-SA

5G presents numerous advantages compared to previous generations: improved throughput, lower latency, and improved privacy protection for subscribers. Attacks against 5G standalone (SA) commonly use fake base stations (FBS), which need to operate at a very high output power level to lure victim phones to connect to them and are thus highly detectable. In this paper, we introduce 5Gone, a powerful software-defined radio (SDR)-based uplink overshadowing attack method against 5G-SA. 5Gone exploits deficiencies in the 3GPP standard to perform surgical, covert denial-of-service, privacy, and downgrade attacks. Uplink overshadowing means that an attacker is transmitting at exactly the same time and frequency as the victim UE, but with a slightly higher output power. 5Gone runs on a COTS x86 computer without any need for dedicated hardware acceleration and can overshadow commercial 100 MHz cells with an E2E latency of less than 500$\mu$s, which up to now has not been possible with any software-based UE implementation. We demonstrate that 5Gone is highly scalable, even when many UEs are connecting in parallel, and finally evaluate the attacks end-to-end against 7 phone models and three different chipset vendors both in our lab and in the real-world on public gNodeBs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Finding Phones Fast: Low-Latency and Scalable Monitoring of Cellular Communications in Sensitive Areas

The widespread availability of cellular devices introduces new threat vectors that allow users or attackers to bypass security policies and physical barriers and bring unauthorized devices into sensitive areas. We identify a critical gap in this context: the absence of low-latency systems for high-quality and instantaneous monitoring of cellular transmissions. Such low-latency systems are crucial to allow for timely detection, decision, and disruption of unauthorized communication in sensitive areas. Operator-based monitoring systems, built for purposes such as people counting or tracking, lack real-time capability, require cooperation across multiple operators, and thus are hard to deploy. Operator-independent monitoring approaches proposed in the literature either lack low-latency capabilities or do not scale. We propose WaveTag, the first low-latency and scalable system designed to monitor 5G and LTE connections across all operators prior to any user data transmission. WaveTag consists of several downlink sniffers and a distributed network of uplink sniffers that measure both downlink protocol information and uplink signal characteristics at multiple locations to gain a detailed spatial image of uplink signals. WaveTag then aggregates the recorded information, processes it, and provides a decision about the connection--all done prior to the complete connection establishment of a UE. To evaluate WaveTag, we deployed it in the context of geofencing, where WaveTag was able to determine whether the signals originate from inside or outside of an area within 2.3 ms of the initial base station-to-device message, therefore enabling prompt and targeted suppression of communication before any user data was transmitted. WaveTag achieved 99.66% geofencing classification accuracy. Finally, we conduct a real-world uplink measurement evaluation on a commercial 5G SA network.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Death By A Thousand COTS: Disrupting Satellite Communications using Low Earth Orbit Constellations

Satellites in Geostationary Orbit (GEO) provide a number of commercial, government, and military services around the world, offering everything from surveillance and monitoring to video calls and internet access. However a dramatic lowering of the cost-per-kilogram to space has led to a recent explosion in real and planned constellations in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) of smaller satellites. These constellations are managed remotely and it is important to consider a scenario in which an attacker gains control over the constituent satellites. In this paper we aim to understand what damage this attacker could cause, using the satellites to generate interference. To ground our analysis, we simulate a number of existing and planned LEO constellations against an example GEO constellation, and evaluate the relative effectiveness of each. Our model shows that with conservative power estimates, both current and planned constellations could disrupt GEO satellite services at every groundstation considered, with effectiveness varying considerably between locations. We analyse different patterns of interference, how they reflect the structures of the constellations creating them, and how effective they might be against a number of legitimate services. We found that real-time usage (e.g. calls, streaming) would be most affected, with 3 constellation designs able to generate thousands of outages of 30 seconds or longer over the course of the day across all groundstations.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Brokenwire : Wireless Disruption of CCS Electric Vehicle Charging

We present a novel attack against the Combined Charging System, one of the most widely used DC rapid charging technologies for electric vehicles (EVs). Our attack, Brokenwire, interrupts necessary control communication between the vehicle and charger, causing charging sessions to abort. The attack requires only temporary physical proximity and can be conducted wirelessly from a distance, allowing individual vehicles or entire fleets to be disrupted stealthily and simultaneously. In addition, it can be mounted with off-the-shelf radio hardware and minimal technical knowledge. By exploiting CSMA/CA behavior, only a very weak signal needs to be induced into the victim to disrupt communication - exceeding the effectiveness of broadband noise jamming by three orders of magnitude. The exploited behavior is a required part of the HomePlug Green PHY, DIN 70121 & ISO 15118 standards and all known implementations exhibit it. We first study the attack in a controlled testbed and then demonstrate it against eight vehicles and 20 chargers in real deployments. We find the attack to be successful in the real world, at ranges up to 47 m, for a power budget of less than 1 W. We further show that the attack can work between the floors of a building (e.g., multi-story parking), through perimeter fences, and from `drive-by' attacks. We present a heuristic model to estimate the number of vehicles that can be attacked simultaneously for a given output power. Brokenwire has immediate implications for a substantial proportion of the around 12 million battery EVs on the roads worldwide - and profound effects on the new wave of electrification for vehicle fleets, both for private enterprise and crucial public services, as well as electric buses, trucks and small ships. As such, we conducted a disclosure to the industry and discussed a range of mitigation techniques that could be deployed to limit the impact.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Signal Injection Attacks against CCD Image Sensors

Since cameras have become a crucial part in many safety-critical systems and applications, such as autonomous vehicles and surveillance, a large body of academic and non-academic work has shown attacks against their main component - the image sensor. However, these attacks are limited to coarse-grained and often suspicious injections because light is used as an attack vector. Furthermore, due to the nature of optical attacks, they require the line-of-sight between the adversary and the target camera. In this paper, we present a novel post-transducer signal injection attack against CCD image sensors, as they are used in professional, scientific, and even military settings. We show how electromagnetic emanation can be used to manipulate the image information captured by a CCD image sensor with the granularity down to the brightness of individual pixels. We study the feasibility of our attack and then demonstrate its effects in the scenario of automatic barcode scanning. Our results indicate that the injected distortion can disrupt automated vision-based intelligent systems.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

They See Me Rollin': Inherent Vulnerability of the Rolling Shutter in CMOS Image Sensors

In this paper, we describe how the electronic rolling shutter in CMOS image sensors can be exploited using a bright, modulated light source (e.g., an inexpensive, off-the-shelf laser), to inject fine-grained image disruptions. We demonstrate the attack on seven different CMOS cameras, ranging from cheap IoT to semi-professional surveillance cameras, to highlight the wide applicability of the rolling shutter attack. We model the fundamental factors affecting a rolling shutter attack in an uncontrolled setting. We then perform an exhaustive evaluation of the attack's effect on the task of object detection, investigating the effect of attack parameters. We validate our model against empirical data collected on two separate cameras, showing that by simply using information from the camera's datasheet the adversary can accurately predict the injected distortion size and optimize their attack accordingly. We find that an adversary can hide up to 75% of objects perceived by state-of-the-art detectors by selecting appropriate attack parameters. We also investigate the stealthiness of the attack in comparison to a na\"{i}ve camera blinding attack, showing that common image distortion metrics can not detect the attack presence. Therefore, we present a new, accurate and lightweight enhancement to the backbone network of an object detector to recognize rolling shutter attacks. Overall, our results indicate that rolling shutter attacks can substantially reduce the performance and reliability of vision-based intelligent systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2003

A Model for Grid User Management

Registration and management of users in a large scale Grid computing environment presents new challenges that are not well addressed by existing protocols. Within a single Virtual Organization (VO), thousands of users will potentially need access to hundreds of computing sites, and the traditional model where users register for local accounts at each site will present significant scaling problems. However, computing sites must maintain control over access to the site and site policies generally require individual local accounts for every user. We present here a model that allows users to register once with a VO and yet still provides all of the computing sites the information they require with the required level of trust. We have developed tools to allow sites to automate the management of local accounts and the mappings between Grid identities and local accounts.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2001

Jet Bundles and the Formal Theory of Partial Differential Equations

Systems of partial differential equations lie at the heart of physics. Despite this, the general theory of these systems has remained rather obscure in comparison to numerical approaches such as finite element models and various other discretisation schemes. There are, however, several theoretical approaches to systems of PDEs, including schemes based on differential algebra and geometric approaches including the theory of exterior differential systems and the so-called ``formal theory'' built on the jet bundle formalism. This paper is a brief introduction to jet bundles focusing on the completion of systems to equivalent involutive systems for which power series solutions may be constructed order by order. We will not consider the mathematical underpinnings of involution (which lie in the theory of combinatorial decompositions of polynomial modules) nor other applications of the theory of jet bundles such as the theory of symmetries of systems of PDEs or discretisation schemes based on discrete approximations to jet bundles.

math.AP↗