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Securing wireless systems via lower layer enforcements

Published: 28 September 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Although conventional cryptographic security mechanisms are essential to the overall problem of securing wireless networks, these techniques do not directly leverage the unique properties of the wireless domain to address security threats. The properties of the wireless medium are a powerful source of domain-specific information that can complement and enhance traditional security mechanisms. In this paper, we propose to utilize the fact that the radio channel decorre-lates rapidly in space, time and frequency in order to to establish new forms of authentication and confidentiality that operate at the physical layer and can be used to facilitate cross-layer security paradigms. Specifically, for authentication services, we illustrate two channel probing techniques that can be used to verify the authenticity of a transmitter. Similarly, for confidentiality, we examine several strategies for establishing shared secrets/keys between two communicators using the wireless medium. These strategies range from extracting keys from channel state information, to utilizing the channel variability to secretly disseminate keys. We then validate the feasibility of using physical layer techniques for securing wireless systems by presenting results from experiments involving the USRP/GNURadio software defined radio platform.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WiSe '06: Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Wireless security
    September 2006
    115 pages
    ISBN:1595935576
    DOI:10.1145/1161289
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 28 September 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. authentication
    2. confidentiality
    3. fading
    4. key establishment
    5. propagation
    6. wireless channel estimation

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    • (2023)Energy Efficient and Secure Scheme Based Compressive Sensing Method for Internet of VehiclesInternet of Things, Smart Spaces, and Next Generation Networks and Systems10.1007/978-3-031-30258-9_23(269-289)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2023
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