Mutual Distance Bounding Protocol with Its Implementability Over a Noisy Channel and Its Utilization for Key Agreement in Peer-to-Peer Wireless Networks

In order to protect a wireless sensor network and an RFID system against wormhole and relay attacks respectively, distance bounding protocols are suggested for the past decade. In these protocols, a verifier authenticates a user as well as estimating an upper bound for the physical distance between the user and itself. Recently, distance bounding protocols, each with a mutual authentication, are proposed to increase the security level for such systems. They are also suggested to be deployed for key agreement protocols in a short-range wireless communication system to prevent Man-in-the-Middle attack. In this paper, a new mutual distance bounding protocol called NMDB is proposed with two security parameters ( \(n\) and \(t\) ). The parameter \(n\) denotes the number of iterations in an execution of the protocol and the parameter \(t\) presents the number of errors acceptable by the verifier during \(n\) iterations. This novel protocol is implementable in a noisy wireless environment without requiring final confirmation message. Moreover, it is shown that, how this protocol can be employed for the key agreement procedures to resist against Man-in-the-Middle attack. NMDB is also analyzed in a noisy environment to compute the success probability of attackers and the rejection probability of a valid user due to channel errors. The analytically obtained results show that, with the proper selection of the security parameters ( \(n\) and \(t\) ) in a known noisy environment, NMDB provides an appropriate security level with a reliable performance.