A coding-theoretic approach for efficient message verification over insecure channels

Abstract

We address the problem of allowing authorized users, who have yet to establish a secret key, to securely and efficiently exchange key establishment messages over an insecure channel in the presence of jamming and message insertion attacks. This problem was first introduced by Strasser, Pöp-per,Čapkun, andČagalj in their recent work, leaving joint consideration of security and efficiency as an open problem. In this paper, we present three approaches based on coding theory which reduce the overall time required to verify the packets and reconstruct the original message in the presence of jamming and malicious insertion. We first present the Hashcluster scheme which reduces the total overhead included in the short packets. We next present the Merkleleaf scheme which uses erasure coding to reduce the average number of packet receptions required to reconstruct the message. We then present the Witnesscode scheme which uses one-way accumulators to individually verify packets and reduce redundancy. We demonstrate through analysis and simulation that our candidate protocols can significantly decrease the amount of time required for key establishment in comparison to existing approaches without degrading the guaranteed level of security.

Adaptive Jamming-Resistant Broadcast Systems with Partial Channel Sharing

“…In addition to jamming-resistant broadcast, researchers have studied jamming-resistant schemes to setup a secret key between two nodes [16]- [18]. These schemes involve a lot of communication overhead and a long delay; they complement our scheme in this paper.…”

Jamming-Resistant Collaborative Broadcast Using Uncoordinated Frequency Hopping

“…Recently, there is a series of promising research efforts on anti-jamming communication without pre-shared keys, including UFH [3], [10], [14], [15], UDSSS [9], [13], [16], and BBC [4].…”

“…In BMA, the erasure coding combined with a one-way authenticator based on bilinear maps can also efficiently address false data injection attacks by jammers. Some additional efficient packet verification methods were proposed in [14].…”

“…In DSD-DSSS [13], a contentbased subset selection technique was proposed to protect the delayed disclosure of seed (key) against powerful intelligent real-time reactive jammers. Another scheme TREKS was proposed in [14] to use gradual disclosure of bits in a key to enable DSSS communication without pre-shared keys. The above DSSS based anti-jamming communication techniques are complementary to the research presented in this paper.…”

“…In particular, Uncoordinated Frequency Hopping (UFH) [3] and its variations [10], [14], [15] achieve frequency hopping communication without using any pre-defined hopping patterns. In these schemes, a broadcast message is divided into multiple short packets, and each packet is transmitted over a selected channel only known to the sender.…”