Secure Distance Bounding Verification using Physical-Channel Properties

TL;DR

This paper explores secure distance verification using physical channel properties instead of time measurement, proposing protocols secure against certain attacks and analyzing their communication complexity.

Contribution

It introduces novel distance bounding verification protocols based on physical channel properties, achieving security against specific attacks and analyzing their efficiency.

Findings

Protocols secure against distance fraud and mafia fraud even with unbounded adversaries.

Impossibility of TFA security without time measurement, unless in the bounded retrieval model.

Numerical analysis of communication complexity of the proposed protocols.

Abstract

We consider the problem of distance bounding verification (DBV), where a proving party claims a distance and a verifying party ensures that the prover is within the claimed distance. Current approaches to "secure" distance estimation use signal's time of flight, which requires the verifier to have an accurate clock. We study secure DBV using physical channel properties as an alternative to time measurement. We consider a signal propagation environment that attenuates signal as a function of distance, and then corrupts it by an additive noise. We consider three attacking scenarios against DBV, namely distance fraud (DFA), mafia fraud (MFA) and terrorist fraud (TFA) attacks. We show it is possible to construct efficient DBV protocols with DFA and MFA security, even against an unbounded adversary; on the other hand, it is impossible to design TFA-secure protocols without time measurement, even with a computationally-bounded adversary. We however provide a TFA-secure construction under the condition that the adversary's communication capability is limited to the bounded retrieval model (BRM). We use numerical analysis to examine the communication complexity of the introduced DBV protocols. We discuss our results and give directions for future research.