Research Projects

Ongoing Projects

Connected Vehicle Security

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications can prevent thousands of deaths caused by vehicle crashes every year only after critical security concerns have been addressed. By examining V2V communication and security protocols, with a particular focus on the physical layer and scheduling algorithms, we identify new vulnerabilities in V2V and develop robust defenses, as well as post-quantum solutions, using our testbed (see V2Verifier). By preventing attackers from leveraging V2V for their own purposes, we are aiming to help bring life-saving V2V technology safely and securely into real-world use.

Selected Publications

Geoff Twardokus, Nina Bindel, Hanif Rahbari, and Sarah McCarthy, "When Cryptography Needs a Hand: Practical Post-Quantum Authentication for V2V Communications," Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2024), San Diego, CA, Feb. 2024. (acceptance rate: 20%). [ Artifacts Evaluated | pdf | Slides | BibTex ]

Geoff Twardokus and Hanif Rahbari, "Towards Protecting 5G Sidelink Scheduling in C-V2X Against Intelligent DoS Attacks," IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (TWC), vol. 22, no. 11, pp. 7273-7286, November 2023. [ link | pdf | BibTex ]

Geoff Twardokus and Hanif Rahbari, "Vehicle-to-Nothing? Securing C-V2X Against Protocol-Aware DoS Attacks," in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2022), Virtual, May 2022, pp. 1629-1638. (acceptance rate: 19.9%) [ link | pdf | YouTube | BibTex ]

Siddharth Dongre and Hanif Rahbari, "Message Sieving to Mitigate Smart Gridlock Attacks in V2V," ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec 2021), Virtual/UAE, July 2021. (acceptance rate: 28%) [ pdf | YouTube | link | BibTex ]

Modulation (de)Obfuscation w/ Machine Learning

While modulation classification in wireless communications is primarily developed for spectrum management, sharing, and enforcement in civilian/military applications, it can be exploited by an adversary to threaten user privacy via traffic analysis, or launch selective jamming and spoofing attacks. Modulation obfuscation aims to conceal the payload’s modulation scheme/transmission rate; hence protecting the users from the related security/privacy attacks. We develop modulation obfuscation techniques and analyze their robustness against novel countermeasures one may employ, including machine learning-based techniques.

Selected Publications

Naureen Hoque and Hanif Rahbari, "Deep Learning Models as Moving Targets to Counter Modulation Classification Attacks," IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2024), Vancouver, Canada, May 2024. (acceptance rate: 19.6%) [ pdf | BibTex ]

Naureen Hoque and Hanif Rahbari, "Circumventing the Defense against Modulation Classification Attacks," ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec 2023), Surrey, UK, May 2023. (acceptance rate: 25%) [ link | pdf | BibTex ]

Peyman Siyari, Hanif Rahbari, and Marwan Krunz, "Lightweight Machine Learning for Efficient Frequency-Offset-Aware Demodulation," IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC)-Machine Learning in Wireless Communications, vol. 37, no. 11, pp. 2544–2558, November 2019. [ pdf | link | BibTex ]

Hanif Rahbari and Marwan Krunz, "Full Frame Encryption and Modulation Obfuscation Using Channel-independent Preamble Identifier," IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (TIFS), vol. 11, no. 12, Dec. 2016. [ link | pdf ]

Recent Projects

Jamming attack on frequency offset estimation: The Achilles' heel of OFDM systems

Selected Publications

Hanif Rahbari and and Marwan Krunz, "Rolling Preambles: Mitigating Stealthy FO Estimation Attacks in OFDM-based 802.11 Systems," 4th IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS 2016), Philadelphia, PA, USA, October 2016 (acceptance rate: 29%) [ pdf ]

Hanif Rahbari, Marwan Krunz, and Loukas Lazos, "Swift Jamming Attack on Frequency Offset Estimation: The Achilles' Heel of OFDM Systems" IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 1264-1278, May 2016. [ link | pdf ]

Hanif Rahbari, Marwan Krunz, and Loukas Lazos, "Security Vulnerability and Countermeasures of Frequency Offset Correction in 802.11a Systems," 33rd IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2014), Toronto, ON, Canada, April 2014, (acceptance rate: 19.4%) [ link | pdf ]

Expanding the role of preambles to support user-defined functionality in WLANs

Selected Publications

Zhengguang Zhang, Hanif Rahbari, and Marwan Krunz, "Adaptive Preamble Embedding with MIMO to Support User-defined Functionalities in WLANs," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 691-707, February 2023. [ link | pdf | BibTex ]

Zhengguang Zhang, Hanif Rahbari, and Marwan Krunz, "Expanding the Role of Preambles to Support User-defined Functionality in MIMO-based WLANs," 39th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2020), Virtual Conference, July 2020 (acceptance rate: 19.8%) [ YouTube | link | pdf | BibTex ]

Hanif Rahbari and Marwan Krunz, "Exploiting Frame Preamble Waveforms to Support New Physical-Layer Functions in OFDM-Based 802.11 Systems," IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (TWC), vol. 16, no. 6, June 2017. [ link | pdf ]