Bootstrapping security among devices is a crucial step for deploying wireless ad hoc networks in sensitive and mission-critical applications. Most existing solutions to security bootstrapping assume the existence of common resources such as additional hardware, auxiliary secure out-of-band (OOB) channels, or pre-existed trust among devices. In pervasive environments, however, these assumptions are not always practical. Given billions of available wireless devices nowadays, devices can be heterogeneous and highly diversified in hardware capabilities or user interfaces, and have limited common resources. This project conducts an exploratory study on bootstrapping security in wireless ad hoc networks without assuming any additional hardware, OOB channel or pre-existed trust. To this end, only physical-layer channel characteristics, which are automatically available to any wireless device, are used for security bootstrapping. Contextual factors such as device mobility and location are studied regarding their impacts on channel characteristics; algorithms for authenticated secret key establishment based on the contextual channel characteristics are designed; the effectiveness and efficiency of the security bootstrapping algorithms and techniques are evaluated through both theoretical analysis and experiments on a real testbed.
The success of this project provides a guideline on feasibility of utilizing channel characteristics for security bootstrapping in different ad hoc network contexts; the algorithms generated by this project provide extremely lightweight security bootstrapping solution that can be deployed on any commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) devices in pervasive environments. The research results of this project will be integrated into education, and disseminated in the forms of tutorials, talks, publications, and online software toolkit.
