In-band Wireless Trust Establishment Resistant to Advanced Signal Manipulations

This project studies novel trust establishment mechanisms among wireless devices without any prior secrets that are resistant against advanced signal manipulations, merely using wireless in-band transmissions. The main goals are three-fold: (1) Message integrity verification and authentication under active signal manipulation. We propose to verify message integrity via detecting the presence of signal cancellation attacks, by exploiting helper's co-presence with the device. We also propose novel channel randomization methods that prevent an attacker from accurately predicting the channel and exploit the real-time nature of the attack to thwart signal cancellation attacks. (2) Modulation-agnostic secure trust establishment. We further propose a set of message integrity and authentication primitives, without any modification to the device's signal format or firmware. Our approach exploits RSS ratio fluctuation patterns and leverages its correlation with random helper motions to prevent signal cancellation. (3) Group device pairing resistant against signal manipulation. We propose novel primitives to verify the integrity of messages transmitted among a group of devices, that harden signal cancellation via exploiting simultaneous verification from multiple devices including the helper.