Abstract
Security methods have traditionally been deployed in the upper layers of the protocol stack. Therefore, the properties of the physical layer, like the wireless channel, have remained unexplored for authentication and confidentiality purposes. Some methods to expand the security mechanisms to lower levels have been suggested and thoroughly analyzed. The usage of the wireless channel for the development of key exchange protocols is based on two main properties: reciprocity and multipath propagation on fading channels. Several methods on how to extract and generate common secrecy using these properties have already been proposed. However, some security drawbacks have also been identified. In this paper, we propose to increase the security of these techniques by additionally utilizing hardware-related properties, namely the impairments in the transceivers’ local oscillators. The validation of this technique is performed in an experimental setup using the USRP/GNU Radio software-defined radio platform.
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Müller-Quade, J., de Almeida, A.S. (2015). Wireless Key Exchange Using Frequency Impairments. In: Rhee, KH., Yi, J. (eds) Information Security Applications. WISA 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8909. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15087-1_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15087-1_22
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