Secure positioning with non-ideal distance bounding protocols

Abstract

Distance bounding protocols are secure protocols to determine an upper bound to the distance between two devices. These protocols have shown to be useful for many tasks, from proximity verification to secure positioning. Unfortunately, real distance bounding protocols hardly fulfill the claimed property. Attacks at the PHY layer may cause significant reductions on the estimated upper bound. These attacks can be mitigated, not eliminated, by changing the receiver architecture and the PHY layer. Every distance bounding protocol is thus non-ideal. In this paper, we study the impact of non-ideal distance bounding on the reliability of secure positioning techniques. We show that a reduction of 10 meters, which is possible against a real PHY layer, allows the adversary to falsify a position of 21 meters. We also propose two countermeasures to mitigate the problem, and then estimate their efficacy by simulations.