VoIPLoc : passive VoIP call provenance via acoustic side-channels

Nagaraja, Shishir and Shah, Ryan; (2021) VoIPLoc : passive VoIP call provenance via acoustic side-channels. In: WiSec 2021 - Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, ARE, pp. 323-334. ISBN 9781450383493 (https://doi.org/10.1145/3448300.3467816)

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Abstract

We propose VoIPLoc, a novel location fingerprinting technique and apply it to the VoIP call provenance problem. It exploits echo-location information embedded within VoIP audio to support fine-grained location inference. We found consistent statistical features induced by the echo-reflection characteristics of the location into recorded speech. These features are discernible within traces received at the VoIP destination, enabling location inference. We evaluated VoIPLoc by developing a dataset of audio traces received through VoIP channels over the Tor network. We show that recording locations can be fingerprinted and detected remotely with a low false-positive rate, even when a majority of the audio samples are unlabelled. Finally, we note that the technique is fully passive and thus undetectable, unlike prior art. VoIPLoc is robust to the impact of environmental noise and background sounds, as well as the impact of compressive codecs and network jitter. The technique is also highly scalable and offers several degrees of freedom terms of the fingerprintable space.

ORCID iDs

Nagaraja, Shishir and Shah, Ryan ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1348-8423;
  • Item type:Book Section
    ID code:78292
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    21 June 2021
    Published
    Keywords:acoustic fingerprint, call provenance, location privacy, source identification, VoIP security, Computer software, Computer Networks and Communications, Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
    Subjects:Science > Mathematics > Computer software
    Department:Faculty of Science > Computer and Information Sciences
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:28 Oct 2021 08:29
    Last modified:25 May 2023 08:26
    Related URLs:
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/78292
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