Impersonation with the Echo Protocol

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the Echo protocol for secure location verification, revealing a vulnerability to impersonation attacks and proposing potential defenses to mitigate this security weakness.

Contribution

It identifies a specific impersonation vulnerability in the Echo protocol and suggests countermeasures to enhance its security against such attacks.

Findings

Impersonation attack exploits the protocol's inability to verify message authenticity.

Proposed defenses include cryptographic methods to prevent impersonation.

The vulnerability highlights the need for integrated cryptographic solutions in physical verification protocols.

Abstract

The Echo protocol tries to do secure location verification using physical limits imposed by the speeds of light and sound. While the protocol is able to guarantee that a certain object is within a certain region, it cannot ensure the authenticity of further messages from the object without using cryptography. This paper describes an impersonation attack against the protocol based on this weakness. It also describes a couple of approaches which can be used to defend against the attack.