Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Small: Understanding the Limitations of Wireless Network Security Designs Leveraging Wireless Properties: New Threats and Defenses in Practice

University Of South Florida, Tampa FL

Investigators

Abstract

Many of today's wireless devices feature small-scale, low-cost designs to align with the requirements of Internet of Things systems and applications. Thus, many of these devices cannot perform cryptographic operations or need to avoid such operations to preserve energy (e.g., implantable medical devices). However, these devices commonly handle sensitive data. An important research direction is to create efficient, lightweight yet secure designs of such devices by leveraging unique wireless channel properties in wireless networks while considering formal adversary models. In this project, this challenge is tackled via an adversary-driven approach to improve wireless network security. The project's novelties are: (i) creating stronger, practical adversary models to understand the limitations of today's security designs of IoT systems leveraging the wireless channel properties and (ii) designing new defense strategies to further advance the state-of-the-art wireless network security designs. The project's broader significance and importance are advancing the state-of-the-art in network security, including undergraduate student training opportunities, openly disseminated training materials, and conducting outreach activities. This project creates new adversary-driven approaches targeting the three design aspects in existing studies: (i) leveraging the channel state information as a unique network profile, (ii) establishing a secret from the wireless channel, and (iii) hiding a secret using the wireless channel. Specifically, the project encompasses three research thrusts based on both system designs and practical evaluations: (i) creating new attacks against channel state information-based user or location profiling/verification and designing network countermeasures; (ii) formulating new adversary models and designing frameworks for wireless secret key establishment, and (iii) proposing new adversary-driven secure information exchange frameworks using the wireless channel. The project involves comprehensive evaluations based on real-world wireless experiments to validate and improve the proposed designs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.