engleski

Secure Initialization of Multiple Constrained Wireless Devices for an Unaided User

A number of protocols and mechanisms have been proposed to address the problem of initial secure key deployment in wireless networks. Most existing approaches work either with a small number of wireless devices (i.e., two) or otherwise rely on the presence of an auxiliary device (such as a programmable camera, computer or Faraday cage). In this paper, we design a solution that allows a user unaided initialization (free from auxiliary devices) of a relatively large number of wireless devices. The proposed solution is based on a novel multichannel Group message Authentication Protocol (GAP), in which information is transmitted over both a radio and a visible light channel (VLC). A notable feature of GAP is that the information to be authenticated is independent of the short authentication string to be verified by the user (an indirect binding protocol [28]). This, as we show, results in a lower communication cost compared to existing direct binding protocols. The advantage in terms of the communication cost of our GAP protocol is especially important for power- constrained devices, such as wireless sensor motes. Another appealing feature of GAP is that it is secure in the attacker model where the VLC is semiauthentic ; whereas existing protocols consider VLC to be authentic. This is made possible by using joint Manchester-Berger unidirectional error-detection codes that are secure and easy to interpret by a non- specialist and unaided end user. Our overall key deployment mechanism has minimal hardware requirements: one LED, one button and, of course, a radio transceiver, and is thus suitable for initializing devices with constrained interfaces, such as (multiple) wireless sensor motes. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method via a preliminary usability study. The study indicates that the method has reasonably low execution time, minimal error rate and is user- friendly.

Message authentication protocol ; Out-of-Band Communication ; Usable security ; Wireless networks

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