The integration of satellite and terrestrial networks effectively addresses geographical limitations, providing extensive and seamless connectivity. Despite robust security measures implemented in both terrestrial networks and satellite communication systems, certain inherent vulnerabilities in LTE/5G protocols can still be exploited, potentially compromising security. In this paper, we propose a security evaluation model, SigOverlay, which targets both terrestrial cellular networks and satellite communication networks. By exploiting the inherent openness of the Physical Broadcast Channel, SigOverlay can stealthily disrupt regular communication without incurring substantial additional power consumption. Experiments with commercial software-defined radios demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of this strategy, revealing security risks in integrated satellite-terrestrial networks.

Current research on the security of radio access networks (RAN) mainly focuses on constructing and analyzing attack models that target individual layers of the protocol stack. However, such attack methods often overlook the inherent vulnerabilities arising from interactions between different layers, which can be exploited to launch more effective attacks. We propose a novel control-plane cross-layer attack, called CLAS (Cross-Layer Attack System), which enables an attacker to use a single device to stealthily spoof the target user, interrupt its existing connection, and hijack it to a fake base station. This results in a covert and persistent Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. Through experiments on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices, we demonstrate that by collaboratively exploiting vulnerabilities across multiple protocol layers, the proposed CLAS only requires 4dB higher transmit power than a legitimate base station to achieve a 100% success rate. The attack effect can persist for up to 760.2 seconds, while simultaneously doubling the energy consumption rate of the victim device. This paper highlights critical security gaps in the current architecture of RAN, particularly in cross-layer protocol vulnerability management.

The security of Radio Access Network (RAN) is increasingly becoming a focal point of attention. The lack of integrity protection and encryption mechanisms in the Radio Resource Control (RRC) protocol before the establishment of a security context poses a significant security threat that cannot be overlooked. Unlike traditional full-band radio jamming and Fake Base Station (FBS) attacks, Signal Overshadowing can precisely target specific time-frequency resource blocks, offering stronger stealth and energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose two novel attack patterns targeting System Information Block type 1 (SIB1) by leveraging Signal Overshadowing. These attacks achieve precise and stealthy signal injection through high-precision time-frequency synchronization. Experimental results demonstrate that both attack patterns can effectively cause Denial of Service (DoS) while maintaining stable characteristics of the received signal, such as Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP), with no significant fluctuations observed. These innovative attack strategies provide valuable insights into the vulnerabilities of the RAN protocols and contribute to the development of further security enhancement mechanisms.

Since agricultural drought plays a leading role in restricting agricultural productivity, accurate forecasting is crucial for agricultural management. Although soil moisture (SM) is the primary variable for identifying and forecasting agricultural drought, accurately predicting SM is challenged by its strong interaction with external meteorological forcings that change rapidly across space and time. To provide a predictive method that reduces uncertainty in SM modeling and compensates for the latency in satellite-based SM products, we propose a meteorologically driven Transformer framework (MDTF). The framework can predict global surface (0–5 cm) and root-zone (0–100 cm) SM utilizing meteorological forecasts and soil physical properties with a prediction latency of 35 days. When validated against satellite-based SM data and in situ measurements, our proposed model more accurately predicts global SM spatial patterns and seasonal dynamics compared with the physics-based Common Land Model (CoLM), demonstrating consistent performance across different land covers. MDTF outperforms popular machine learning models, achieving unbiased root-mean-square error (ubRMSE) values of 0.0297 m3/m3 and 0.0211 m3/m3 for surface and root-zone SM. The predicted seamless global daily SM information could be effectively utilized for agricultural drought forecasting. Our research demonstrates that the MDTF model has unique advantages in modeling key hydrological variables of the Earth system, providing a reference for predicting time series of global SM and agricultural drought dynamics.

Advancement in pairing-based protocols has had a major impact on the applicability of cryptography to the solution of more complex real-world problems. However, the computation of pairings in software still needs to be optimized for different platforms including emerging embedded systems and high-performance PCs. Few works in the literature have considered implementations of pairings on the former applications despite their growing importance in a post-PC world. In this paper, we investigate the efficient computation of the Optimal-Ate pairing over special class of pairing friendly Barreto-Naehrig curves in software at different security levels. We target both applications and perform our implementations on ARM-powered processors (with and without NEON instructions) and PC processors. We exploit state-of-the-art techniques and propose new optimizations to speed up the computation in the different levels including tower field and curve arithmetic. In particular, we extend the concept of lazy reduction to inversion in extension fields, analyze an efficient alternative for the sparse multiplication used inside the Miller’s algorithm and reduce further the cost of point/line evaluation formulas in affine and projective homogeneous coordinates. In addition, we study the efficiency of using M-type and D-type sextic twists in the pairing computation and carry out a detailed comparison between affine, Jacobian, and homogeneous coordinate systems. Our implementations on various mass-market emerging embedded devices significantly improve the state-of-the-art of pairing computation on ARM-powered devices and x86-64 PC platforms. For ARM implementations we achieved considerably faster computations in comparison to the counterparts.