Personal Marks and Community Certificates: Detecting Clones in Mobile Wireless Networks of Smart-Phones

TL;DR

This paper introduces Personal Marks and Community Certificates, two mechanisms leveraging social contact patterns to detect cloned devices in mobile wireless networks, enhancing security against insider and outsider attacks.

Contribution

It proposes novel biometric-based authentication methods using social contact data to identify cloned devices in mobile ad hoc networks.

Findings

Personal Marks effectively detect insider clones.

Community Certificates identify outsider clones.

Combined mechanisms provide strong security against clone attacks.

Abstract

We consider the problem of detecting clones in wireless mobile adhoc networks. We assume that one of the devices of the network has been cloned. Everything, including certificates and secret keys. This can happen quite easily, because of a virus that immediately after sending all the content of the infected device to the adversary destroys itself, or just because the owner has left his device unattended for a few minutes in a hostile environment. The problem is to detect this attack. We propose a solution in networks of mobile devices carried by individuals. These networks are composed by nodes that have the capability of using short-range communication technology like blue-tooth or Wi-Fi, where nodes are carried by mobile users, and where links appear and disappear according to the social relationships between the users. Our idea is to use social physical contacts, securely collected by wireless personal smart-phones, as a biometric way to authenticate the legitimate owner of the device and detect the clone attack. We introduce two mechanisms: Personal Marks and Community Certificates. Personal Marks is a simple cryptographic protocol that works very well when the adversary is an insider, a malicious node in the network that is part, or not very far, from the social community of the original device that has been cloned. Community Certificates work very well when the adversary is an outsider, a node that has the goal of using the stolen credentials when interacting with other nodes that are far in the social network from the original device. When combined, these mechanisms provide an excellent protection against this very strong attack. We prove our ideas and solutions with extensive simulations in a real world scenario-with mobility traces collected in a real life experiment