In-band Wireless Trust Establishment Resistant to Advanced Signal Manipulations
Abstract
Small unit expeditionary forces are deployed to operate immediately in areas without infrastructure and oftentimes, with minimal reachback. For such operation scenarios, establishing security associations is a fundamental step toward guaranteeing secure communications among hand-held or wearable devices. This trust needs to be established and maintained in a spontaneous fashion to account for the ad hoc unit formation and lack of trust infrastructure. Traditional key management solutions relying on preloaded secrets and central authorities are not suitable in this setting, due to the intermittent reachback connectivity, device heterogeneity, and inefficiency of key revocation in the event of device capture. These limitations give rise to many challenges for establishing trust through wireless in the absence of preloaded secrets or trust repositories, mainly because the wireless channel is an open medium, known to be vulnerable to a variety of attacks such as eavesdropping and Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks. Among them, MitM attacks through advanced signal manipulation such as signal cancellation and injection are especially difficult to detect and prevent, without any pre-shared secrets. Such advanced attacks have been shown to be practical in recent years; although being the most powerful ones among all MitM attacks due to their stealthy nature, no effective defenses against them are known to date. In this project, we propose novel trust establishment mechanisms among wireless devices without any prior secrets that are resistant against advanced signal manipulations, merely using wireless in-band transmissions. Contrary to traditional physical layer based security methods, our proposed approaches do not require or rely on channel advantage ((i.e., the relative advantage of legitimate devicesÕ channel over adversaryÕs channel). Instead, we exploit various intrinsic physical signal propagation laws that are difficult to forge or break. For example, the fact that signal manipulation is an online attack that must happen in real-time, and any delay in the attackerÕs actions will miss the opportunity. This enables us to achieve high levels of security guarantees regardless of wireless channel conditions, and under powerful attacks such as those equipped with directional antennas or multiple antenna arrays, and capable of transmitting at high power. A central theme in our proposed approach is to leverage a helper device to assist with trust establishment. The helper already shares a security association with one of the devices in the network, and it helps to securely introduce new devices, at no extra hardware cost. The helper assumes various roles in our proposed protocols; for example, by exploiting the helperÕs co-presence with the new and existing device(s), trust can be transferred from the helper to the new device. The helper further assists in thwarting various wireless attacks, which are hard to prevent in the absence of trust. Our research efforts are organized into three interrelated research thrusts:...
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 14, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1910050
Entities
People
- Ming Li
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- United States Army
- University of Arizona