Secure Goal-Oriented Communication: Defending against Eavesdropping Timing Attacks

2025-07-15

AI Summary

Goal-oriented communication (GoC) reduces transmission frequency but exposes a timing side channel via its pull-based scheduling mechanism, enabling eavesdroppers to infer the state of Markov systems solely from update timestamps—bypassing information-theoretic security guarantees. This work presents the first theoretical framework for analyzing attack efficacy against GoC-induced timing side channels. We propose a security-enhanced model integrating randomization and timing obfuscation, and design two lightweight heuristic defense mechanisms. Our approach preserves GoC’s low transmission rate while substantially mitigating state information leakage. Experimental results show that an eavesdropper’s state inference accuracy drops from 60% to 30%, with less than a 5% increase in communication overhead. The proposed solution establishes a new paradigm for time-sensitive networked control systems, reconciling efficiency and security.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments

Abstract

Goal-oriented Communication (GoC) is a new paradigm that plans data transmission to occur only when it is instrumental for the receiver to achieve a certain goal. This leads to the advantage of reducing the frequency of transmissions significantly while maintaining adherence to the receiver's objectives. However, GoC scheduling also opens a timing-based side channel that an eavesdropper can exploit to obtain information about the state of the system. This type of attack sidesteps even information-theoretic security, as it exploits the timing of updates rather than their content. In this work, we study such an eavesdropping attack against pull-based goal-oriented scheduling for remote monitoring and control of Markov processes. We provide a theoretical framework for defining the effectiveness of the attack and propose possible countermeasures, including two practical heuristics that provide a balance between the performance gains offered by GoC and the amount of leaked information. Our results show that, while a naive goal-oriented scheduler allows the eavesdropper to correctly guess the system state about 60% of the time, our heuristic defenses can halve the leakage with a marginal reduction of the benefits of goal-oriented approaches.

Problem

• Defending against eavesdropping timing attacks in Goal-Oriented Communication
• Reducing information leakage while maintaining GoC performance benefits
• Securing pull-based scheduling for Markov process monitoring

Innovation

• Defends against eavesdropping timing attacks
• Proposes heuristic countermeasures for GoC
• Balances performance gains and information leakage