A Novel Demodulation Scheme for Secure and Reliable UWB Distance Bounding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new demodulation scheme for UWB distance bounding that significantly enhances security against relay attacks without complex pulse reordering, by adding security constraints during demodulation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel demodulation approach that increases relay attack resistance in UWB protocols through additional security constraints, simplifying implementation.

Findings

Reduces relay attack success probability by a factor of 40.

Achieves comparable reliability to state-of-the-art protocols.

Requires only pulse masking and distance commitment, no pulse reordering.

Abstract

Relay attacks pose an important threat in wireless ranging and authentication systems. Distance bounding protocols have been proposed as an effective countermeasure against these attacks and allow a verifier and a prover to establish an upper bound on the distance between them. However, secure distance bounding protocols are hard to realize in practice due to stringent implementation requirements. In this paper, we look into a yet unexplored research area and show how the security strength of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) distance bounding protocols can be significantly increased by imposing several additional security constraints during demodulation and decoding at the receiver. We demonstrate that for equal reliability metrics as in state-of-the-art UWB distance bounding protocols, our solution achieves a reduction of the success probability of a relay attack by a factor of 40. Moreover, we also argue that our security solution only needs to be combined with pulse masking and a distance commitment to achieve these security bounds and there is no need to have pulse reordering in our modulation.