Message Integrity Protection over Wireless Channel by Countering Signal Cancellation

Abstract

Physical layer message integrity protection and authentication by countering signal-cancellation has been shown as a promising alternative to traditional pure cryptographic message authentication protocols, due to the non-necessity of neither pre-shared secrets nor secure channels. However, the security of such an approach remained an open problem due to the lack of systematic security modeling and quantitative analysis. In this paper, we first establish a novel correlated jamming framework to study the optimal signal-cancellation attacker's behavior and utility using game-theory, which precisely captures the attacker's knowledge using its correlated channel estimates in various channel environments. Besides, we design a practical physical layer message integrity protection protocol based on ON/OFF keying and Manchester coding, which provides quantitative security guarantees in the real-world. Such a guarantee is achieved by bounding the attacker's knowledge about the future channel via proactively measuring channel statistics (mimic the attacker), so as to derive a lower-bound to the defender's signal-detection probability under optimal correlated jamming attacks. We conduct extensive experiments and simulations to show the security and performance of the proposed scheme. We believe our novel threat modeling and quantitative security analysis methodology can benefit a wide range of physical layer security problems.

ROBin: Known-Plaintext Attack Resistant Orthogonal Blinding via Channel Randomization

“…The vulnerability of preliminary orthogonal blinding results from the unchanged main channel, which allows the eavesdropper to estimate it via known symbols and filter the AN out. Actually, this flaw can be amended with the channel randomization approach, which is to actively randomize the wireless channel by introducing special antennas [21], [24], antenna motions [22] or artificial channel disturbance [23]. Intuitively, when the wireless channel is rapidly randomized, Eve can be blocked from gathering enough symbols for filter training.…”

“…Different from this work, their scheme is only applicable to single-antenna transmitters and does not use pre-coding. To defend against active man-in-the-middle attacks, Hou et al [23] and Pan et al [24] randomized the wireless channel with a fan and a reconfigurable antenna respectively to prevent online signal cancellation. All these works show that channel randomization approach can be a powerful tool to enhance physical-layer security.…”

Secure Device Bootstrapping Without Secrets Resistant to Signal Manipulation Attacks

“…However, OOB channels usually require non-trivial human support and advanced user interfaces. To reduce the human interaction there have been few past attempts to design in-band message integrity protection mechanisms, which assume that signal cancellation over the wireless channel is not possible [5], or occurs with bounded success [7], [23]. For example, the Tamper-Evident Pairing (TEP) protocol proposed by Gollakota et al [8], and the integrity codes (I-codes) proposed byČapkun et al [5] both assumed the infeasibility of signal cancellation.…”

“…However, the infeasibility of signal cancellation assumption does not always hold. Pöpper et al first showed the feasibility of signal cancellation attacks using carefully placed relay nodes and directional antennas [22], Recently, Hou et al [23] showed that success probability of signal cancellation attack in the oneto-one setting depends on the randomness of the legitimate channel. A typical indoor environment may not be sufficient because the devices are static and the channel is usually stable.…”

“…However, it was recently demonstrated that signal cancellation and injection is possible under more predictable channel conditions [22], [23]. For many applications, devices are paired in a relatively static indoor environment, where the channels between devices are predictable and slow fading.…”