Publications (2)0 Total impact
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Conference Proceeding: Good Neighbor: Ad hoc Pairing of Nearby Wireless Devices by Multiple Antennas.
Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2011, San Diego, California, USA, 6th February - 9th February 2011; 01/2011 -
Article: Good Neighbor: Ad-Hoc Authentication of Nearby Wireless Devices by Multiple Antenna Diversity
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ABSTRACT: As wireless devices proliferate, in many situations we wish to authenticate devices by mere prox-imity. This is the common authentication mechanism for wired devices where we plug them into each other. In this paper we propose a scheme for authenticating nearby wireless devices that share no prior secrets. The scheme takes advantage of multiple antennae built in many modern wireless devices. The scheme is based on the characteristic of wireless channels that the power of the received signal is inverse proportional to some exponent of the distance between the sender and receiver. When a nearby sender is very close to one antenna on the receiver, the receiver can observe a large difference between the power measured on its two antennae, whereas a faraway sender would be unable to induce this large difference. We validate our scheme through theoretical analysis and experimental measurements. We discuss other factors that may affect our scheme, including antenna gain, RSS saturation, dynamic rate adaptation, and multipath effects. Since multipath effects can seriously undermine our scheme, we propose to use multi-channel measurements to mitigate it. Finally, we evaluate our scheme by authenticating a mobile phone to a laptop using threshold values derived from our measurement and observed satisfactory results.
