Secure Distance Bounding Research Articles

Cross-Layer RF Distance Bounding Scheme for Passive and Semi-passive Ubiquitous Computing Systems

Distance Bounding protocols have surfaced as an appealing security measure in ubiquitous computing systems with access control provisions whereby the physical proximity of a user becomes significantly important for its explicit privileges and assurances. These systems employ cryptographic protocols to ensure security. However, security vulnerabilities have been demonstrated that exploit not only the cryptographic protocol but the physical implementation of the protocol itself. Distance Bounding resolves this problem by tightly integrating cryptographic security with the physical layer through a cross-layer security design. The core idea is to employ physical proximity as a security fingerprint to ensure that the legitimate entity (namely ‘prover’) lies within an agreed spatial range of another entity (‘verifier’). While a large number of Distance Bounding protocols have been proposed in the past, they mainly focus on designing a secure authentication scheme integrated with a suitable distance measurement approach, disregarding multiple concerns in the practical realization of these protocols – which we termed as a cross-layer problem. Only a few practical Distance Bounding realizations have been demonstrated which however focus on some selected cross-layer design parameters. As a result, either these protocols are impractical as a realizable system, or in most cases, an attacker can easily exploit cross-layer vulnerabilities especially if the prover is a resource-constrained entity such as a fully passive or battery-assisted access control token. This requires formulation of a careful prover design while ensuring that secure authentication and precise ranging are tightly integrated in a cross-layer manner for a realizable system. To resolve these issues, we first present a holistic approach to designing a secure Distance Bounding system by identifying essential cross-layer parameters. While analyzing the salient Distance Bounding realizations, we observe them to be designed for a single-bit communication channel. We optimize the communication bit rate by incorporating a high-order modulation technique in our proposed scheme to achieve higher date rates while ensuring the overall integrity of cross-layer design parameters. Besides, we specifically analyze the effects of the prover's impedance mismatch on link efficacy and security. This is a significant factor which depicts the allowable tolerances in the prover's impedance from design to manufacturing phases. Lastly, we present a comparison between prior approaches and our proposed scheme while introducing Qualitative Measure Matrix (QMM-I) and Quantitative Measure Matrix (QMM-II), which are devised from cross-layer design parameters for a secure Distance Bounding realization.

Integrated secure distance bounding and hardware-based security: A case study for the insurance claim verification of farmers during COVID-19.

Given the rapidly evolving developments in Fintech, Insurtech, Open Banking, and Mobile Money business models in recent years, the capability for ensuring strong authentication remains the most pressing need for the protection of security and privacy of data in this sector as in many other areas. The security-integrity of insurance and financial transactions and workflows is vitally dependent on access control mechanisms to deliver strong multi-factor authentication (MFA) with operationally acceptable latency and throughput to support real-time response, particularly as demanded by the increasing online and mobile financial service models. The Critical-Chains Project was motivated by the above objectives as underpinned by the overarching commitment to accountability engineering as required by the operational logic. This must be crucially supported by real-time hardware-enabled services comprising authentication (including Distance Bounding and Prover's Proximal Location Presence Verification), hardware security and cryptography (AUTH-as-a-Service, Hardware-Security-as-a-Service, Cryptography-as-a-Service) as delivered through the Critical-Chains main framework. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of the innovative Hardware-enabled authentication and security capabilities of the Critical-Chains framework which is successfully validated in the context of financial services, specifically the insurance claim settlement application domain, and can also be deployed in any other domains where trusted authentication and specific location-time bound prover's presence verification is required.

A Secure Distance Bounding Protocol with Two-Bit Challenges

A Secure Distance Bounding Protocol with Two-Bit Challenges

Practical and provably secure distance-bounding

From contactless payments to remote car unlocking, many applications are vulnerable to relay attacks. Distance bounding protocols are the main practical countermeasure against these attacks. In this paper, we present a formal analysis of SKI, which recently emerged as the first family of lightweigh t and provably secure distance bounding protocols. More precisely, we explicate a general formalism for distance-bounding protocols, which lead to this practical and provably secure class of protocols (and it could lead to others). We prove that SKI and its variants are provably secure, even under the real-life setting of noisy communications, against the main types of relay attacks: distance-fraud and generalised versions of mafia- and terrorist-fraud. To attain resistance to terrorist-fraud, we reinforce the idea of using secret sharing, combined with the new notion of a leakage scheme. In view of resistance to generalised mafia-frauds (and terrorist-frauds), we present the notion of circular-keying for pseudorandom functions (PRFs); this notion models the employment of a PRF, with possible linear reuse of the key. We also identify the need of PRF masking to fix common mistakes in existing security proofs/claims. Finally, we enhance our design to guarantee resistance to terrorist-fraud in the presence of noise.