Safe Association with Discovered Wireless Devices

Mgr. Ravi Shankar Yadav

Master's thesis

Abstract:

In the recent years wireless personal area networks (WPANs) have gained a great popularity, particularly due to the ease of use. Yet with the ease of use comes great security concerns. One of the important concerns is safe association of wireless devices, without which these devices are highly vulnerable to a large number of attacks [5, 16, 24, 25]. Cryptographic key establishment based methods [6, 9, 10, 11, 22] for achieving safe association among such devices have been the most prominent approaches proposed by researchers to address the security concerns. Although these methods have found a direct applicability in some of the wireless devices, most of these fail to meet the requirements arising due to the constrained resources like, energy source, memory, and computation capabilities. To address this issue related to usability of cryptography based safe association methods in resource-constrained wireless devices, researchers have explored alternative approaches by leveraging relevant characteristics of the wireless channels. Safe association methods based on received signal strength (RSS) is one of such approaches which promises to address this concern for a large class of low-end small wireless devices. Result of these works indicates that merely using cryptographic methods does not capture the full spectrum of possible solutions and the invent in non-cryptographic methods promises to augment the spectrum of wireless security solutions [12]. This thesis provides a review of related work on RSS based safe association methods for wireless devices that do not depend on conventional cryptographic methods or any shared cryptographic material. It also provides a comparative analysis between non-cryptographic safe association methods and cryptographic safe association methods for wireless devices.

Abstract:

In the recent years wireless personal area networks (WPANs) have gained a great popularity, particularly due to the ease of use. Yet with the ease of use comes great security concerns. One of the important concerns is safe association of wireless devices, without which these devices are highly vulnerable to a large number of attacks [5, 16, 24, 25]. Cryptographic key establishment based methods [6, 9, 10, 11, 22] for achieving safe association among such devices have been the most prominent approaches proposed by researchers to address the security concerns. Although these methods have found a direct applicability in some of the wireless devices, most of these fail to meet the requirements arising due to the constrained resources like, energy source, memory, and computation capabilities. To address this issue related to usability of cryptography based safe association methods in resource-constrained wireless devices, researchers have explored alternative approaches by leveraging relevant characteristics of the wireless channels. Safe association methods based on received signal strength (RSS) is one of such approaches which promises to address this concern for a large class of low-end small wireless devices. Result of these works indicates that merely using cryptographic methods does not capture the full spectrum of possible solutions and the invent in non-cryptographic methods promises to augment the spectrum of wireless security solutions [12]. This thesis provides a review of related work on RSS based safe association methods for wireless devices that do not depend on conventional cryptographic methods or any shared cryptographic material. It also provides a comparative analysis between non-cryptographic safe association methods and cryptographic safe association methods for wireless devices.

Keywords

cryptographic safe association, non-cryptographic safe association, proximity authentication, received signal strength, wireless device safe association, wireless security

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 22. 5. 2017

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 20. 6. 2017
• Supervisor: prof. RNDr. Václav Matyáš, M.Sc.
• Reader: RNDr. Martin Stehlík, Ph.D.

Masaryk University

Faculty of Informatics

Master programme / field:
Informatics / Information Technology Security (eng.)