Abstract
Mobile computing devices are widely used in our daily life. With their increased use, a large amount of sensitive data are collected, stored, and managed in the mobile devices. To protect sensitive data, encryption is often used but, traditional encryption is vulnerable to coercive attacks in which the device owner is coerced by the adversary to disclose the decryption key. To defend against the coercive attacks, Plausibly Deniable Encryption (PDE) has been designed which can allow the victim user to deny the existence of hidden sensitive data. The PDE systems have been explored broadly for smartphones. However, the PDE systems which are suitable for wearable mobile devices are still missing in the literature.
In this work, we design \(\mathsf{MobiWear}\), the first PDE system specifically for wearable mobile devices. To accommodate the hardware nature of wearable devices, \(\mathsf{MobiWear}\): 1) uses image steganography to achieve PDE, which suits the resource-limited wearable devices; and 2) relies on various sensors equipped with the wearable devices to input passwords, rather than requiring users to enter them via a keyboard or a touchscreen. Security analysis and experimental evaluation using a real-world prototype (ported to an LG G smartwatch) show that \(\mathsf{MobiWear}\) can ensure deniability with a small computational overhead as well as a small decrease of image quality.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Note that the examples we show here are only limited to the scope of capturing criminal evidence in a region of oppression or conflict.
References
LG G watch (2016). https://www.lg.com/us/smart-watches/lg-W100-lg-watch
Wear OS (2016). https://wearos.google.com/#stay-connected
Agarwal, A.: Image-steganography-library-android (2011). https://github.com/aagarwal1012/Image-Steganography-Library-Android
Anderson, R., Needham, R., Shamir, A.: The steganographic file system. In: Aucsmith, D. (ed.) IH 1998. LNCS, vol. 1525, pp. 73–82. Springer, Heidelberg (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49380-8_6
Chang, B., et al.: User-friendly deniable storage for mobile devices. Comput. Secur. 72, 163 (2017)
Chang, B., Wang, Z., Chen, B., Zhang, F.: Mobipluto: file system friendly deniable storage for mobile devices. In: Proceedings of the 31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pp. 381–390 (2015)
Chang, B., et al.: Mobiceal: towards secure and practical plausibly deniable encryption on mobile devices. In: 2018 48th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), pp. 454–465. IEEE (2018)
Chaumont, M., Puech, W.: A DCT-based data-hiding method to embed the color information in a jpeg grey level image. In: 2006 14th European Signal Processing Conference, pp. 1–5. IEEE (2006)
Chen, B., Chen, N.: Poster: a secure plausibly deniable system for mobile devices against multi-snapshot adversaries. In: 2020 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Poster Session (2020)
Chen, C., Chakraborti, A., Sion, R.: Infuse: invisible plausibly-deniable file system for nand flash. Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol. 4, 239–254 (2020)
Chen, C., Chakraborti, A., Sion, R.: Pearl: plausibly deniable flash translation layer using WOM coding. In: The 30th Unsenix Security Symposium (2021)
CodePlex. Veracrypt ssd. https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/, 2017
Trnka, D.: Steganography software.version 1.3 (2014). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dinaga.photosecret&hl=en_US&gl=US
EDS. Free open source on-the-fly disk encryption software.version 2.0.0.243 (2012). http://www.sovworks.com/
How to encrypt your devices (2017). https://spreadprivacy.com/how-to-encrypt-devices/
Feng, W., et al.: Mobigyges: a mobile hidden volume for preventing data loss, improving storage utilization, and avoiding device reboot. Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 109, 158 (2020)
Hong, S., Liu, C., Ren, B., Huang, Y., Chen, J.: Personal privacy protection framework based on hidden technology for smartphones. IEEE Access 5, 6515–6526 (2017)
Hussain, M., Hussain, M.: Pixel intensity based high capacity data embedding method. In: 2010 International Conference on Information and Emerging Technologies, pp. 1–5. IEEE (2010)
Hussain, M., Hussain, M.: A survey of image steganography techniques (2013)
Ibrahim, R., Teoh, S.K.: Teganography algorithm to hide secret message inside an image. J. Comput. Technol. Appl. (JCTA) 1(2), 102–108 (2011)
Jia, S., Xia, L., Chen, B., Liu, P.: DEFTL: implementing plausibly deniable encryption in flash translation layer. In: Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. ACM (2017)
Johnson, N.F., Jajodia, S.: Exploring steganography seeing the unseen. Computer 31(2), 26–34 (1998)
Liu, L., Chen, T., Cao, C., Wen, X., Xie, R.: A novel data embedding method using random pixels selecting. Inf. Technol. J. 12(7), 1299 (2013)
McDonald, A.D., Kuhn, M.G.: StegFS: a steganographic file system for linux. In: Pfitzmann, A. (ed.) IH 1999. LNCS, vol. 1768, pp. 463–477. Springer, Heidelberg (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/10719724_32
Peters, T.M., Gondree, M.A., Peterson, Z.N.J.: DEFY: a deniable, encrypted file system for log-structured storage. In: 22th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS (2015)
Singh, A.K., Singh, J., Singh, H.V.: Steganography in images using LSB technique. Int. J. Latest Trends Eng. Technol. (IJLTET) 5(1), 426–430 (2015)
Skillen, A., Mannan, M.: On implementing deniable storage encryption for mobile devices. In: 20th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2013, San Diego, California, USA (2013)
Skillen, A., Mannan, M.: Mobiflage: deniable storage encryption for mobile devices. IEEE Trans. Depend. Secure Comput. 11(3), 224–237 (2014)
Source. Android full disk encryption (2016). https://source.android.com/security/encryption/
TrueCrypt. Free open source on-the-fly disk encryption software. version 7.1a (2012). http://www.truecrypt.org/
Da-Chun, W., Tsai, W.-H.: A steganographic method for images by pixel-value differencing. Pattern Recogn. Lett. 24(9–10), 1613–1626 (2003)
You, W., Chen, B., Liu, L., Jing, J.: Deduplication-friendly watermarking for multimedia data in public clouds. In: Chen, L., Li, N., Liang, K., Schneider, S. (eds.) ESORICS 2020. LNCS, vol. 12308, pp. 67–87. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58951-6_4
Yu, X., Chen, B., Wang, Z., Chang, B., Zhu, W.T., Jing, J.: Mobihydra: pragmatic and multi-level plausibly deniable encryption storage for mobile devices. In: Information Security - 17th International Conference, ISC 2014, Hong Kong, China. Proceedings, pp. 555–567 (2014)
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by US National Science Foundation under grant number 1928349-CNS, 1928331-CNS, and 1938130-CNS.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chen, N., Chen, B., Shi, W. (2021). MobiWear: A Plausibly Deniable Encryption System for Wearable Mobile Devices. In: Chen, B., Huang, X. (eds) Applied Cryptography in Computer and Communications. AC3 2021. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 386. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80851-8_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80851-8_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-80850-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-80851-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)