UWB-ED: Distance Enlargement Attack Detection in Ultra-Wideband
This addresses a critical security vulnerability for mobile autonomous systems, robots, and cyber-physical systems that rely on accurate positioning, offering a novel solution to a previously unsolved problem.
The paper tackles the problem of adversarial distance enlargement attacks in ultra-wideband distance-measurement systems, which lack existing protections, by proposing UWB-ED, a new modulation technique that detects such attacks and securely verifies distances, showing its applicability to standards like 802.15.4z and 5G.
Mobile autonomous systems, robots, and cyber-physical systems rely on accurate positioning information. To conduct distance-measurement, two devices exchange signals and, knowing these signals propagate at the speed of light, the time of arrival is used for distance estimations. Existing distance-measurement techniques are incapable of protecting against adversarial distance enlargement---a highly devastating tactic in which the adversary reissues a delayed version of the signals transmitted between devices, after distorting the authentic signal to prevent the receiver from identifying it. The adversary need not break crypto, nor compromise any upper-layer security protocols for mounting this attack. No known solution currently exists to protect against distance enlargement. We present \textit{Ultra-Wideband Enlargement Detection} (UWB-ED), a new modulation technique to detect distance enlargement attacks, and securely verify distances between two mutually trusted devices. We analyze UWB-ED under an adversary that injects signals to block/modify authentic signals. We show how UWB-ED is a good candidate for 802.15.4z Low Rate Pulse and the 5G standard.