Message Integrity Protection over Wireless Channel by Countering Signal Cancellation

Yantian Hou, Ming Li, Ruchir Chauhan, Ryan M. Gerdes, Kai Zeng
2015 Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security - ASIA CCS '15  
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
more » ... tudy 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.
doi:10.1145/2714576.2714617 dblp:conf/ccs/HouLCGZ15 fatcat:b6qr656utrcszdybwxjzpp5k24