Peripheral Authentication for Parked Vehicles over Wireless Radio Communication

TL;DR

This paper proposes a secure vehicle-to-keyfob authentication scheme that incorporates physical movement verification and a three-way handshake to prevent relay attacks in wireless vehicle access.

Contribution

It introduces a novel three-way handshake protocol with movement verification, enhancing security against relay attacks in vehicle wireless authentication systems.

Findings

The scheme effectively prevents relay attacks by verifying physical movement.

It is adaptable with existing cryptographic commitment schemes.

The protocol reduces the need for multiple iteration rounds compared to distance bounding methods.

Abstract

Peripheral authentication is an important aspect in the vehicle networks to provide services to only authenticated peripherals and a security to internal vehicle modules such as anti-lock braking system, power-train control module, engine control unit, transmission control unit, and tire pressure monitoring. In this paper a three-way handshake scheme is proposed for a vehicle to a keyfob authentication. A keyfob is a key with a secure hardware that communicates and authenticates the vehicle over the wireless channel. Conventionally, a vehicle to keyfob authentication is realized through a challenge-response verification protocol. An authentic coupling between the vehicle identity and the keyfob avoids any illegal access to the vehicle. However, these authentication messages can be relayed by an active adversary, thereby, can amplify the actual distance between an authentic vehicle and a keyfob. Eventually, an adversary can possibly gain access to the vehicle by relaying wireless signals and without any effort to generate or decode the secret credentials. Hence, the vehicle to keyfob authentication scheme must contain an additional attribute verification such as physical movement of a keyfob holder. Our solution is a two-party and three-way handshake scheme with proactive and reactive commitment verification. The proposed solution also uses a time interval verification such that both vehicle and keyfob would yield a similar locomotion pattern of a dynamic keyfob within a similar observational time interval. Hence, the solution is different from the distance bounding protocols that require multiple iterations for the round-trip delay measurement. The proposed scheme is shown to be adaptable with the existing commitment scheme such as Schnorr identification scheme and Pedersen commitment scheme.