SBIR-STTR Award

Direct to Phase II

US forces deployed abroad often have to use foreign-manufactured and -operated mobile infrastructure for communications, especially in the early stages of operations. The infrastructure might be in a friendly, neutral, or hostile region, yet has to be relied upon for secure communication. Non-authorized, misconfigured, or compromised systems increase the risk of malicious activities impacting the security of the US forces and their operations due to the lack of visibility into its configuration, operation, and management. Even in a Blue terrain environment, authorization is vital due to outsourcing of the 5G systems and components. The supply chain for devices commonly employed in 5G networks includes not only the (potentially) trusted system integrators and/or suppliers. Many entities in these highly complex and globally distributed supply chains are untrusted, possibly controlled by adversary foreign governments. Assembling a supply chain consisting of trusted entities is prohibitively costly. Hence, a mechanism that authenticates the components of 5G systems is a necessity. Due to the ubiquitous nature and abundance of 5G systems, this detection/authentication mechanism must be highly sensitive, cost-effective, and easily/quickly deployable. Aether Argus Inc. is pleased to propose “ArEMGuard - Mobile Infrastructure Authenticationin Expeditionary Regions via Unintended Electromagnetic Emission Monitoring”. ArEMGuard represents a novel and unique approach to protect both legacy and 5G mobile core network elements (MCNEs) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices against firmware supply chain attacks and detecting run-time (software) exploitation. The primary novel aspect of our proposed research is the combination of techniques that leverage unintended electromagnetic emissions (EMEs) to conduct runtime state attestation for MCNEs. These emissions are byproducts of legitimate operations on a given hardware platform with a characteristic pattern that can be sensed from close proximity. With ArEMGuard, we will investigate the applicability of EME analysis to provide protection for MCNEs and/or IoT devices at more complex software/hardware configurations operating in RF-noisy environments, while using less expensive sensing and processing devices.