Can Commercial LED Bulbs Pose a Threat to PLC System Security?

Techniques that improve interfacing between power-line communication (PLC) systems and LED-based visible light communication (VLC) systems start to gain attention in recent years. Indeed, this hybrid system is able to provide simultaneously power, lighting, and data transmission. Contrariwise, if the integration between PLC and commercial LED bulbs is done unintentionally, the risks of PLC data leakage by commercial LED bulbs must be carefully analyzed. Thus, in this paper, the risks of eavesdropping on the PLC network via commercial LED bulbs are studied. The impact of the LED driver on PLC data leakage through LED bulbs is explained. The electrical-optical channel transfer function for different LED bulbs and the power spectral density of the signal received through the LED bulbs when two commercial powerline modems are plugged into the same power line are measured. Afterwards, pseudo random binary sequence signals are injected into the electrical-optical channel in order to assess quantitatively the possibility to extract information from the received signal. Finally, simple LED driver modifications that foster and increase the leakage are analyzed.