Wireless-channel Key Exchange

Afonso Arriaga; Petra Sala; Marjan Škrobot

Paper 2023/454

Wireless-channel Key Exchange

Afonso Arriaga

, University of Luxembourg

Petra Sala

, SES Techcom

Marjan Škrobot, University of Luxembourg

Abstract

Wireless-channel key exchange (WiKE) protocols that leverage Physical Layer Security (PLS) techniques could become an alternative solution for secure communication establishment, such as vehicular ad-hoc networks, wireless IoT networks, or cross-layer protocols. In this paper, we provide a novel abstraction of WiKE protocols and present the first game-based security model for WiKE. Our result enables the analysis of security guarantees offered by these cross-layer protocols and allows the study of WiKE's compositional aspects. Further, we address the potential problem of the slow-rate secret-key generation in WiKE due to inadequate environmental conditions that might render WiKE protocols impractical or undesirably slow. We explore a solution to such a problem by bootstrapping a low-entropy key coming as the output of WiKE using a Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE). On top of the new security definition for WiKE and those which are well-established for PAKE, we build a compositional WiKE-then-PAKE model and define the minimum security requirements for the safe sequential composition of the two primitives in a black-box manner. Finally, we show the pitfalls of previous ad-hoc attempts to combine WiKE and PAKE.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. CT-RSA 2023
Keywords: WiKE wireless channel key exchange PAKE Physical Layer Security cross-layer design
Contact author(s): afonso arriaga @ uni lu
petra sala @ ses com
marjan skrobot @ uni lu
History: 2023-03-31: approved; 2023-03-29: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2023/454
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/454,
      author = {Afonso Arriaga and Petra Sala and Marjan Škrobot},
      title = {Wireless-channel Key Exchange},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/454},
      year = {2023},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/454}
}