Integrity regions: Authentication through presence in wireless networks

Srdjan Capkun, Mario Cagalj, Ghassan Karame, Nils Ole Tippenhauer

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Despite years of intensive research, the main deterrents of widely deploying secure communication between wireless nodes remains the cumbersome key setup process. In this paper, we address this problem and we introduce Integrity (I) regions, a novel security primitive that enables message authentication in wireless networks without the use of preestablished or precertified keys. Integrity regions are based on the verification of entity proximity through time-of-arrival ranging techniques. IRegions can be efficiently implemented with ultrasonic ranging, in spite of the fact that ultrasound ranging techniques are vulnerable to distance enlargement and reduction attacks. We further show how IRegions can be used for key establishment in mobile peer-to-peer wireless networks and we propose a novel automatic key establishment approach, largely transparent to users, by leveraging on IRegions and nodes' mobility. We analyze our proposals against a multitude of security threats and we validate our findings via extensive simulations.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number5506087
    Pages (from-to)1608-1621
    Number of pages14
    JournalIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
    Volume9
    Issue number11
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Nov 2010

    Keywords

    • Authentication
    • distance bounding
    • key establishment
    • node mobility
    • wireless networks.

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