SmartLED: Smartphone-Based Covert Channels Leveraging the Notification LED

• Published in: 2020 IEEE 19th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom) pp. 1748 - 1755
• Main Authors: Gonzalez-Manzano, Lorena, Bernardez, Sergio, de Fuentes, Jose M.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-12-2020
• Subjects: Covert channel; Covert communication; Encoding; Light emitting diodes; Meters; Notification LED; Password; Privacy; Security; Smart phones; Smartphone
• DOI: 10.1109/TrustCom50675.2020.00240
• EISSN: 2324-9013

The widespread adoption of smartphones make them essential in daily routines. Thus, they can be used to create a covert channel without raising suspicions. To avoid detection, networkless communications are preferred. In this paper, we propose SmartLED, a mechanism to build covert channels leveraging a widely available smartphone feature - its notification LED. The secret is encoded through LED blinks using Manhattan encoding. SmartLED is assessed in real-world indoor and outdoor scenarios, considering different distances up to 5 meters. Our results show that the best performance is achieved in dark settings - 34.8 s. are needed to exfiltrate a 7-byte password to a distance of 1 m. Remarkably, distance does not cause a great impact on effective transmission time and shorter blinks do not lead to substantially greater transmission errors.