GDB: Group Distance Bounding Protocols

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first secure group distance bounding protocols, enabling multiple provers and verifiers to establish upper-bound distance estimates, with applications in device pairing, access control, and localization.

Contribution

It presents novel passive and mutual multi-party GDB protocols, filling a gap in secure distance bounding research for group scenarios.

Findings

Protocols are secure and efficient in group settings.

Compared favorably with existing single-prover DB techniques.

Applicable to practical scenarios like device pairing and localization.

Abstract

Secure distance bounding (DB) protocols allow one entity, the verifier, to securely obtain an upper-bound on the distance to another entity, the prover. Thus far, DB was considered mostly in the context of a single prover and a single verifier. There has been no substantial prior work on secure DB in group settings, where a set of provers interact with a set of verifiers. The need for group distance bounding (GDB) is motivated by many practical scenarios, including: group device pairing, location-based access control and secure distributed localization. GDB is also useful in mission-critical networks and automotive computer systems. This paper addresses, for the first time, GDB protocols by utilizing the new passive DB primitive and the novel mutual multi-party GDB protocol. We show how they can be used to construct secure and efficient GDB protocols for various settings. We analyze security and performance of our protocols and compare them with existing DB techniques when applied to group settings.