Acoustic Side-Channel Communications for Aerial Drones with HUM
Authors: 
Suryansh Sharma, Robert Lica, Venkatesha Prasad, 
Luca Mottola, Leszek AmbroziakAuthors Info & Claims
Suryansh Sharma, Robert Lica, Venkatesha Prasad, Luca Mottola, Leszek AmbroziakAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 267 - 280
Abstract
We present HUM-High-frequency UAV Messaging: an acoustic side channel communication system we design for localized drone-to-drone communications. We generate Pulse Width Modulated (PWM) signals from drone motors to carry information and improve communication reliability by mitigating propeller noise interference through modifications to the propeller's physical design. These modifications reduce propeller noise in the designated acoustic spectrum by up to 7 dB. We deploy a custom ultrasonic microphone shield specifically designed for decoding in the receiver. HUM's improved signal-to-noise ratio enables up to 80x higher data rates compared to the existing design from the literature while providing better scalability. HUM supports simultaneous decoding across 16 drones within 8 m, range as seen in real flight tests. The cost of this performance is minimal; we experimentally demonstrate that HUM has a marginal impact on flight dynamics and battery life.
References
[1]
2015. Crazyflie Firmware Repository. https://github.com/bitcraze/crazyflie-firmware/commits/master/src/modules/src/sound_cf2.c
[2]
2023. EspressIF ESPDrone. https://docs.espressif.com/projects/espressif-esp-drone/en/latest/gettingstarted.html
[3]
2024. Remote Identification of Drones | Federal Aviation Administration. https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/remote_id
[4]
Mikhail Afanasov, Alessandro Djordjevic, Feng Lui, and Luca Mottola. 2019. Fly-Zone: A testbed for experimenting with aerial drone applications. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services. 67--78.
[5]
Saeed H Alsamhi, Ou Ma, Mohammad Samar Ansari, and Faris A Almalki. 2019. Survey on collaborative smart drones and internet of things for improving smartness of smart cities. Ieee Access 7 (2019), 128125--128152.
[6]
Riham Altawy and Amr M Youssef. 2016. Security, privacy, and safety aspects of civilian drones: A survey. ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems 1, 2 (2016), 1--25.
[7]
Hadi Ardiny and Amir Mohammad Beigzadeh. 2024. Enhancing radioactive environment exploration with bio-inspired swarm robotics: A comparative analysis of Lévy flight and stigmergy methods. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 181 (11 2024), 104794.
[8]
Dmitri Asonov and Rakesh Agrawal. 2004. Keyboard acoustic emanations. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2004. Proceedings. 2004. IEEE, 3--11.
[9]
Michael Backes, Markus Dürmuth, Sebastian Gerling, Manfred Pinkal, Caroline Sporleder, et al. 2010. Acoustic {Side-Channel} attacks on printers. In 19th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 10).
[10]
Adeola Bannis, Hae Young Noh, and Pei Zhang. 2020. Bleep: motor-enabled audio side-channel for constrained UAVs. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom '20). Association for Computing Machinery, 1--13.
[11]
Jody Berger and Josie Garthwaite. 2021. Lessons from Fukushima disaster 10 years later | Stanford Report. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2021/03/lessons-fukushima-disaster-10-years-later
[12]
Bitcraze AB 2021. Crazyflie 2.1. Bitcraze AB. Rev. 3.
[13]
Rafael G. Braga, Roberto C. da Silva, Alexandre C. B. Ramos, and Felix Mora-Camino. 2017. UAV swarm control strategies: A case study for leak detection. In 2017 18th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR). 173--178.
[14]
E. Bregu et al. 2016. Reactive Control of Autonomous Drones. In Proceedings of ACM MobiSys, Singapore, June 26--30, 2016.
[15]
Zhihao Chen, Chao Liu, Ekta Rani, Harishchandra Singh, Marko Huttula, Jukka Kömi, and Wei Cao. 2021. Ultrasonic vibration-induced severe plastic deformation of Cu foils: effects of elastic-plastic stress wave bounce, acoustic softening, and size effect. The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology 115, 11 (2021), 3617--3629.
[16]
Asaf Cidon, Kanthi Nagaraj, Sachin Katti, and Pramod Viswanath. 2012. Flashback: decoupled lightweight wireless control. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2012 Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication (Helsinki, Finland) (SIGCOMM '12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 223--234.
[17]
Radu Curpen, Titus Bălan, Ioan Alexandru Micloş, and Ionut Comanici. 2018. Assessment of signal jamming efficiency against LTE UAVs. In 2018 International Conference on Communications (COMM). IEEE, 367--370.
[18]
DSV. 2020. DSV improves warehouse operations with drone system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N87L_nO2ms&t=49s
[19]
Sara Eriksson, Åsa Unander-Scharin, Vincent Trichon, Carl Unander-Scharin, Hedvig Kjellström, and Kristina Höök. 2019. Dancing with drones: Crafting novel artistic expressions through intercorporeality. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--12.
[20]
European Union Aviation Safety Agency. 2024. Easy Access Rules for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (Regulation (EU) 2019/947 and Regulation (EU) 2019/945). https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/downloads/110913/en
[21]
Dario Floreano and Robert J Wood. 2015. Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones. Nature 521, 7553 (2015), 460.
[22]
Ming Gao, Feng Lin, Weiye Xu, Muertikepu Nuermaimaiti, Jinsong Han, Wenyao Xu, and Kui Ren. 2020. Deaf-aid: mobile IoT communication exploiting stealthy speaker-to-gyroscope channel. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. 1--13.
[23]
Lav Gupta, Raj Jain, and Gabor Vaszkun. 2016. Survey of Important Issues in UAV Communication Networks. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 18, 2 (2016), 1123--1152.
[24]
Timothy Hornyak. 2016. How robots are becoming critical players in nuclear disaster cleanup | Science | AAAS. https://www.science.org/content/article/how-robots-are-becoming-critical-players-nuclear-disaster-cleanup
[25]
Harvey H Hubbard. 1991. Aeroacoustics of flight vehicles: theory and practice. Vol. 1. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Management.
[26]
HUM. 2024. HUM video demonstration. https://youtu.be/Ji_CjWFnaB4
[27]
Vikram Iyer, Maruchi Kim, Shirley Xue, Anran Wang, and Shyamnath Gollakota. 2020. Airdropping Sensor Networks from Drones and Insects. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.
[28]
Justin W Jaworski and Nigel Peake. 2020. Aeroacoustics of silent owl flight. Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics 52 (2020), 395--420.
[29]
Song Min Kim and Tian He. 2015. FreeBee: Cross-technology Communication via Free Side-channel. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Paris, France) (MobiCom '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 317--330.
[30]
Younghyun Kim, Woo Suk Lee, Vijay Raghunathan, Niraj K. Jha, and Anand Raghunathan. 2015. Vibration-Based Secure Side Channel for Medical Devices. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Design Automation Conference (San Francisco, California) (DAC '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 32, 6 pages.
[31]
Knowles 2013. Zero-Height SiSonic Microphone. Knowles. Rev. H.
[32]
Angus Leslie, Kee Choon Wong, and Doug Auld. 2008. Broadband noise reduction on a mini-UAV propeller. In 14th AIAA/CEAS Aeroacoustics Conference (29th AIAA Aeroacoustics Conference). 3069.
[33]
Jian Liu, Yan Wang, Gorkem Kar, Yingying Chen, Jie Yang, and Marco Gruteser. 2015. Snooping keystrokes with mm-level audio ranging on a single phone. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. 142--154.
[34]
Reda R Mankbadi, Samuel Afari, and Vladimir V Golubev. 2020. Simulations of broadband noise of a small uav propeller. In AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum. 1493.
[35]
Dubravko Miljković. 2018. Methods for attenuation of unmanned aerial vehicle noise. In 2018 41st International Convention on Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics (MIPRO). 0914--0919.
[36]
Abdirahman Mohamud and Ashwin Ashok. 2018. Drone noise reduction through audio waveguiding. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Micro Aerial Vehicle Networks, Systems, and Applications. 92--94.
[37]
Luca Mottola, Mattia Moretta, Kamin Whitehouse, and Carlo Ghezzi. 2014. Team-level programming of drone sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems. 177--190.
[38]
Luca Mottola and Kamin Whitehouse. 2017. Mobile systems research with drones. GetMobile: Mobile Computing and Communications 20, 4 (2017), 17--22.
[39]
Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Krishna Kant Chintalapudi, Venkat Padmanabhan, and Ramarathnam Venkatesan. 2013. Dhwani: secure peer-to-peer acoustic NFC. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 43, 4 (2013), 63--74.
[40]
Mustafa Melikşah Özmen and Bekir Aksoy. 2023. An example application for an identification of friend and foe (IFF) system appropriate for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) based on deep learning. Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems 107, 3 (2023), 36.
[41]
Federico Petricelli, Paruchuri Chaitanya, Sergi Palleja-Cabre, Stefano Meloni, Phillip F Joseph, Amin Karimian, Suresh Palani, and Roberto Camussi. 2023. An experimental investigation on the effect of in-flow distortions of propeller noise. Applied Acoustics 214 (2023), 109682.
[42]
Sixu Piao, Zhongjie Ba, Lu Su, Dimitrios Koutsonikolas, Shi Li, and Kui Ren. 2019. Automating csi measurement with uavs: from problem formulation to energy-optimal solution. In IEEE INFOCOM 2019-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications. IEEE, 2404--2412.
[43]
James A. Preiss, Wolfgang Honig, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, and Nora Ayanian. 2017. Crazyswarm: A large nano-quadcopter swarm. In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 3299--3304.
[44]
James A. Preiss, Wolfgang Honig, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, and Nora Ayanian. 2017. Crazyswarm: A large nano-quadcopter swarm. In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 3299--3304.
[45]
Aveek Purohit, Zheng Sun, Frank Mokaya, and Pei Zhang. 2011. SensorFly: Controlled-mobile sensing platform for indoor emergency response applications. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks. IEEE, 223--234.
[46]
Yujie Qian, Yuliang Wei, Deyi Kong, and He Xu. 2021. Experimental investigation on motor noise reduction of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Applied Acoustics 176 (2021), 107873.
[47]
Jacek Rak, David Hutchison, Janos Tapolcai, Rasa Bruzgiene, Massimo Tornatore, Carmen Mas-Machuca, Marija Furdek, and Paul Smith. 2020. Fundamentals of communication networks resilience to disasters and massive disruptions. Guide to disaster-resilient communication networks (2020), 1--43.
[48]
Soundarya Ramesh, Thomas Pathier, and Jun Han. 2019. SoundUAV: Fingerprinting Acoustic Emanations for Delivery Drone Authentication (Poster). In Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (Seoul, Republic of Korea) (MobiSys '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 632--633.
[49]
Ralph Restituyo and Thaier Hayajneh. 2018. Vulnerabilities and attacks analysis for military and commercial iot drones. In 2018 9th IEEE Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON). IEEE, 26--32.
[50]
Himmat Singh Sandhu and Siddhartha Raja. 2019. No Broken Link: The Vulnerability of Telecommunication Infrastructure to Natural Hazards. World Bank.
[51]
Suryansh Sharma, Tristan Dijkstra, and R Venkatesha Prasad. 2023. Open Gimbal: A 3 Degrees of Freedom Open Source Sensing and Testing Platform for Nano and Micro UAVs. IEEE Sensors Letters (2023).
[52]
Suryansh Sharma, Ashutosh Simha, Venkatesha Prasad, Shubham Deshmukh, Kavin Balaji Saravanan, Ravi Ramesh, and Luca Mottola. 2023. BEAVIS: Balloon Enabled Aerial Vehicle for IoT and Sensing. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. 1--15.
[53]
Xiufang Shi, Chaoqun Yang, Weige Xie, Chao Liang, Zhiguo Shi, and Jiming Chen. 2018. Anti-drone system with multiple surveillance technologies: Architecture, implementation, and challenges. IEEE Communications Magazine 56, 4 (2018), 68--74.
[54]
Alex Stoll. 2012. Design of quiet UAV propellers. Stanford University.
[55]
Yimiao Sun, Weiguo Wang, Luca Mottola, Ruijin Wang, and Yuan He. 2023. AIM: Acoustic Inertial Measurement for Indoor Drone Localization and Tracking. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Boston, Massachusetts) (SenSys '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 476--488.
[56]
Hartmut Surmann, Tiffany Kaiser, Artur Leinweber, Gerhard Senkowski, Dominik Slomma, and Marc Thurow. 2021. Small Commercial UAVs for Indoor Search and Rescue Missions. In IEEE International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Applications. 106--113.
[57]
Lina Tang and Guofan Shao. 2015. Drone remote sensing for forestry research and practices. Journal of Forestry Research 26 (2015), 791--797.
[58]
Texas Instruments 2023. LMV3xx Low-Voltage Rail-to-Rail Output Operational Amplifier. Texas Instruments. Rev. Y.
[59]
Teodor Tomic, Korbinian Schmid, Philipp Lutz, Andreas Domel, Michael Kassecker, Elmar Mair, Iris Lynne Grixa, Felix Ruess, Michael Suppa, and Darius Burschka. 2012. Toward a fully autonomous UAV: Research platform for indoor and outdoor urban search and rescue. IEEE robotics & automation magazine 19, 3 (2012), 46--56.
[60]
Kenneth W. Van Treuren and Charles F. Wisniewski. 2019. Testing Propeller Tip Modifications to Reduce Acoustic Noise Generation on a Quadcopter Propeller. Journal of Engineering for Gas Turbines and Power 141, 12 (11 2019), 121017. arXiv:https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/gasturbinespower/article-pdf/141/12/121017/6448668/gtp_141_12_121017.pdf
[61]
Kenneth W Van Treuren and Charles F Wisniewski. 2019. Testing propeller tip modifications to reduce acoustic noise generation on a quadcopter propeller. Journal of Engineering for Gas Turbines and Power 141, 12 (2019), 121017.
[62]
Gurkan Tuna, Bilel Nefzi, and Gianpaolo Conte. 2014. Unmanned aerial vehicle-aided communications system for disaster recovery. Journal of network and computer Applications 41 (2014), 27--36.
[63]
Gábor Vásárhelyi, Csaba Virágh, Gergő Somorjai, Tamás Nepusz, Agoston E Eiben, and Tamás Vicsek. 2018. Optimized flocking of autonomous drones in confined environments. Science Robotics 3, 20 (2018), eaat3536.
[64]
Weiguo Wang, Jinming Li, Yuan He, Xiuzhen Guo, and Yunhao Liu. 2022. Motor-Beat: Acoustic Communication for Home Appliances via Variable Pulse Width Modulation. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 6, 1 (2022), 1--24.
[65]
Weiguo Wang, Luca Mottola, Yuan He, Jinming Li, Yimiao Sun, Shuai Li, Hua Jing, and Yulei Wang. 2023. MicNest: Long-Range Instant Acoustic Localization of Drones in Precise Landing. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (Boston, Massachusetts) (SenSys '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 504--517.
[66]
Ware. 2020. Automating cycle counting with warehouse drones at CEVA Logistics | Ware. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV34cMDfu_0
[67]
Yuliang Wei, Feng Xu, Shiyuan Bian, and Deyi Kong. 2020. Noise reduction of UAV using biomimetic propellers with varied morphologies leading-edge serration. Journal of Bionic Engineering 17 (2020), 767--779.
[68]
Kaishun Wu, Haoyu Tan, Yunhuai Liu, Jin Zhang, Qian Zhang, and Lionel Ni. 2010. Side channel: bits over interference. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Chicago, Illinois, USA) (MobiCom '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 13--24.
[69]
American Physical Society X. 2013. The secrets of owls' near Noiseless Wings. https://phys.org/news/2013-11-secrets-owls-noiseless-wings.html
[70]
Xiangyu Xu, Jiadi Yu, Yingying Chen, Yanmin Zhu, Linghe Kong, and Minglu Li. 2019. BreathListener: Fine-Grained Breathing Monitoring in Driving Environments Utilizing Acoustic Signals. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (Seoul, Republic of Korea) (MobiSys '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 54--66.
[71]
Sangki Yun, Yi-Chao Chen, Huihuang Zheng, Lili Qiu, and Wenguang Mao. 2017. Strata: Fine-Grained Acoustic-Based Device-Free Tracking. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (Niagara Falls, New York, USA) (MobiSys '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 15--28.
[72]
Maotian Zhang, Ping Li, Panlong Yang, Jie Xiong, and Chang Tian. 2016. Poster: Sonicnect: Accurate Hands-Free Gesture Input System with Smart Acoustic Sensing. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services Companion (Singapore, Singapore) (MobiSys '16 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 91.
[73]
Bing Zhou, Mohammed Elbadry, Ruipeng Gao, and Fan Ye. 2017. BatMapper: Acoustic Sensing Based Indoor Floor Plan Construction Using Smart-phones. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (Niagara Falls, New York, USA) (MobiSys '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 42--55.
[74]
Manfu Zhu and Liran Ma. 2024. A review of recent advances in the effects of surface and interface properties on marine propellers. Friction 12, 2 (2024), 185--214.
[75]
Yulong Zou, Jia Zhu, Tonghua Wu, Haiyan Guo, and Hao Wei. 2021. Cooperative Drone Communications for Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks. IEEE Network 35, 5 (2021), 100--106.
Index Terms
- Acoustic Side-Channel Communications for Aerial Drones with HUM
Recommendations
Drones and Privacy
Drones, also referred to as UAV's Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, are an aircraft without a human pilot. Drones have been used by various military organisations for over a decade, but in recent years drones a have been emerging more and more in commercial and ...
Automated execution of a pest bird deterrence system using a programmable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
Highlights- Efforts towards automating bird deterrence using UAV and ground camera systems.
AbstractCrop damage caused by pest birds is a big problem around the world. As many studies have shown, existing bird control methods have not met growers' expectations regarding efficacy, reliability, and cost. Researchers are investigating ...
Acoustic Stall Detection of Variable Pitch Propeller for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
AbstractThis paper presents an analysis of acoustic emission and performance data of a UAV rotor equipped with a variable pitch propeller. The proposed study aims to show propeller noise features that indicate stall flow regime on the blade. Analysis of ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
November 2024
950 pages
ISBN:9798400706974
DOI:10.1145/3666025
- Chair:
- Jie Liu,
- Co-chairs:
- Yuanchao Shu,
- Jiming Chen,
- Program Chair:
- Yuan He,
- Program Co-chair:
- Rui Tan
Copyright © 2024 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Sponsors
- SIGARCH: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture
- SIGBED: ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems
- SIGMETRICS: ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation
- SIGMOBILE: ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing
- SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 04 November 2024
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Conference
SenSys '24
SenSys '24: 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
November 4 - 7, 2024
Hangzhou, China
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 174 of 867 submissions, 20%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 308Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)308
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)130
Reflects downloads up to 05 Jan 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in