Paper 2009/602

Secure Ranging With Message Temporal Integrity

Nils Ole Tippenhauer, Kasper Bonne Rasmussen, and Srdjan Čapkun

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of delay attacks on radio frequency time of arrival (ToA) secure ranging. In secure ranging, two mutually trusted devices try to determine their distance in the presence of an attacker. A delay attack consists of delaying the ranging messages exchanged between the devices, resulting in an increase of themeasuredmessage arrival times and thus in an increase of the measured distance. In this work, we propose the first secure ranging protocol that enables the detection of delay attacks on ranging. This protocol therefore enables two trusted devices to obtain a secure estimate of their mutual distance; existing solutions enabled the devices only to obtain an upper bound on their mutual distance. We further discuss possible implementations of our secure ranging protocol using Ultra-Wide-Band radio technology. Finally, we introduce and formally define the notion of message temporal integrity, a message security property which relates to message delay and advancement.