Research Projects

While modulation classification in wireless communications is primarily developed for AI-native receivers or for spectrum management, sharing, and enforcement, it can also be exploited by adversaries to compromise user privacy or system integrity through traffic analysis, selective jamming, or spoofing attacks. Modulation deception (obfuscation, masking, or morphing) aims to conceal the payload’s modulation scheme and transmission rate—side-channel information not protected by data encryption—thereby shielding users from related security and privacy threats. We develop and evaluate dynamic deception techniques to defend against emerging, persistent, and adaptive attacks—including those using machine and deep learning—by leveraging the principles of moving target defense (MTD).

Cellular networks are rapidly expanding their coverage and capacity to enhance connectivity services. However, this expansion likely requires coexistence with other systems—such as Wi-Fi and radio astronomy—on newly allocated frequencies. Zero-forcing beamforming is a prominent approach for limiting a base station’s interference at unintended or incumbent receivers. We investigate how this technique can be used to efficiently coexist with active Wi-Fi access points and passive radio telescopes, which require a quiet zone to detect faint signals from celestial objects, while addressing potential negative impacts on intended users and the risk of security threats in interference management, e.g., Wi-Fi starvation and astronomical measurements poisoning attacks.

While modern Wi-Fi systems rely on strong encryption and authentication, they remain vulnerable due to exposed pre-authentication exchanges and protocol metadata, which are susceptible to spoofing, man-in-the-middle (MitM), and denial-of-service attacks. Metadata at the pre-authentication stage—such as the preamble, operating channel, and timestamps—can be spoofed or abused to launch various attacks. We develop a cross-layer defense scheme that splits lightweight digital signatures across physical-layer preambles. Combined with a time-bound mechanism, this approach protects against spoofing, relaying, and other threats. We evaluate it on a hardware testbed and verify its correctness using a model checker and cryptographic protocol verifier.