On the Usability of Secure Association of Wireless Devices Based on Distance Bounding

When users wish to establish wireless communication between their devices, the channel needs to be bootstrapped first. Usually, the channel is desired to be authenticated and confidential, in order to mitigate any malicious control of or eavesdropping over the communication. When there is no prior security context, such as, shared secrets, common key servers or public key certificates, device association necessitates some level of user involvement into the process. A wide variety of user-aided security association techniques have been proposed in the past. A promising set of techniques require out-of-band communication between the devices (e.g., auditory, visual, or tactile). The usability evaluation of such techniques has been an active area of research. In this paper, our focus is on the usability of an alternative method of secure association – Integrity regions (I-regions) [40] – based on distance bounding. Iregions achieves secure association by verification of entity prox...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CANS
• Authors: Mario Cagalj, Nitesh Saxena, Ersin Uzun
• Keywords: CANS 2009, Cryptology, Secure Association, Security Association Techniques, Usability