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Panos Papadimitratos

Publications and source records attributed to Panos Papadimitratos.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
arXiv2017

CLIMEX: A Wireless Physical Layer Security Protocol Based on Clocked Impulse Exchanges

A novel method and protocol establishing common secrecy based on physical parameters between two users is proposed. The four physical parameters of users are their clock frequencies, their relative clock phases and the distance between them. The protocol proposed between two users is backed by theoretical model for the measurements. Further, estimators are proposed to estimate secret physical parameters. Physically exchanged parameters are shown to be secure by virtue of their non-observability to adversaries. Under a simplified analysis based on a testbed settings, it is shown that 38 bits of common secrecy can be derived for one run of the proposed protocol among users. The method proposed is also robust against various kinds of active timing attacks and active impersonating adversaries.

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arXiv2017

SECMACE: Scalable and Robust Identity and Credential Management Infrastructure in Vehicular Communication Systems

Several years of academic and industrial research efforts have converged to a common understanding on fundamental security building blocks for the upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. There is a growing consensus towards deploying a special-purpose identity and credential management infrastructure, i.e., a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI), enabling pseudonymous authentication, with standardization efforts towards that direction. In spite of the progress made by standardization bodies (IEEE 1609.2 and ETSI) and harmonization efforts (Car2Car Communication Consortium (C2C-CC)), significant questions remain unanswered towards deploying a VPKI. Deep understanding of the VPKI, a central building block of secure and privacy-preserving VC systems, is still lacking. This paper contributes to the closing of this gap. We present SECMACE, a VPKI system, which is compatible with the IEEE 1609.2 and ETSI standards specifications. We provide a detailed description of our state-of-the-art VPKI that improves upon existing proposals in terms of security and privacy protection, and efficiency. SECMACE facilitates multi-domain operations in the VC systems and enhances user privacy, notably preventing linking pseudonyms based on timing information and offering increased protection even against honest-but-curious VPKI entities. We propose multiple policies for the vehicle-VPKI interactions, based on which and two large-scale mobility trace datasets, we evaluate the full-blown implementation of SECMACE. With very little attention on the VPKI performance thus far, our results reveal that modest computing resources can support a large area of vehicles with very low delays and the most promising policy in terms of privacy protection can be supported with moderate overhead.

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arXiv2017

Secure Estimation and Zero-Error Secrecy Capacity

We study the problem of securely estimating the states of an unstable dynamical system subject to nonstochastic disturbances. The estimator obtains all its information through an uncertain channel which is subject to nonstochastic disturbances as well, and an eavesdropper obtains a disturbed version of the channel inputs through a second uncertain channel. An encoder observes and block-encodes the states in such a way that, upon sending the generated codeword, the estimator's error is bounded and such that a security criterion is satisfied ensuring that the eavesdropper obtains as little state information as possible. Two security criteria are considered and discussed with the help of a numerical example. A sufficient condition on the uncertain wiretap channel, i.e., the pair formed by the uncertain channel from encoder to estimator and the uncertain channel from encoder to eavesdropper, is derived which ensures that a bounded estimation error and security are achieved. This condition is also shown to be necessary for a subclass of uncertain wiretap channels. To formulate the condition, the zero-error secrecy capacity of uncertain wiretap channels is introduced, i.e., the maximal rate at which data can be transmitted from the encoder to the estimator in such a way that the eavesdropper is unable to reconstruct the transmitted data. Lastly, the zero-error secrecy capacity of uncertain wiretap channels is studied.

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arXiv2017

Evaluating On-demand Pseudonym Acquisition Policies in Vehicular Communication Systems

Standardization and harmonization efforts have reached a consensus towards using a special-purpose Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) in upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. However, there are still several technical challenges with no conclusive answers; one such an important yet open challenge is the acquisition of shortterm credentials, pseudonym: how should each vehicle interact with the VPKI, e.g., how frequently and for how long? Should each vehicle itself determine the pseudonym lifetime? Answering these questions is far from trivial. Each choice can affect both the user privacy and the system performance and possibly, as a result, its security. In this paper, we make a novel systematic effort to address this multifaceted question. We craft three generally applicable policies and experimentally evaluate the VPKI system performance, leveraging two large-scale mobility datasets. We consider the most promising, in terms of efficiency, pseudonym acquisition policies; we find that within this class of policies, the most promising policy in terms of privacy protection can be supported with moderate overhead. Moreover, in all cases, this work is the first to provide tangible evidence that the state-of-the-art VPKI can serve sizable areas or domain with modest computing resources.

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arXiv2017

Preserving Confidentiality in The Gaussian Broadcast Channel Using Compute-and-Forward

We study the transmission of confidential messages across a wireless broadcast channel with K>2 receivers and K helpers. The goal is to transmit all messages reliably to their intended receivers while keeping them confidential from the unintended receivers. We design a codebook based on nested lattice structure, cooperative jamming, lattice alignment, and i.i.d. coding. Moreover, we exploit the asymmetric compute-and-forward decoding strategy to handle finite SNR regimes. Unlike previous alignment schemes, our achievable rates are attainable at any finite SNR value. Also, we show that our scheme achieves the optimal sum secure degrees of freedom of 1 for the K-receiver Gaussian broadcast channel with K confidential messages and K helpers.

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arXiv2017

The Key to Intelligent Transportation: Identity and Credential Management in Vehicular Communication Systems

Vehicular Communication (VC) systems will greatly enhance intelligent transportation systems. But their security and the protection of their users' privacy are a prerequisite for deployment. Efforts in industry and academia brought forth a multitude of diverse proposals. These have now converged to a common view, notably on the design of a security infrastructure, a Vehicular Public Key Infrastructure (VPKI) that shall enable secure conditionally anonymous VC. Standardization efforts and industry readiness to adopt this approach hint to its maturity. However, there are several open questions remaining, and it is paramount to have conclusive answers before deployment. In this article, we distill and critically survey the state of the art for identity and credential management in VC systems, and we sketch a roadmap for addressing a set of critical remaining security and privacy challenges.

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arXiv2016

Uncertain Wiretap Channels and Secure Estimation

Uncertain wiretap channels are introduced. Their zero-error secrecy capacity is defined. If the sensor-estimator channel is perfect, it is also calculated. Further properties are discussed. The problem of estimating a dynamical system with nonstochastic disturbances is studied where the sensor is connected to the estimator and an eavesdropper via an uncertain wiretap channel. The estimator should obtain a uniformly bounded estimation error whereas the eavesdropper's error should tend to infinity. It is proved that the system can be estimated securely if the zero-error capacity of the sensor-estimator channel is strictly larger than the logarithm of the system's unstable pole and the zero-error secrecy capacity of the uncertain wiretap channel is positive.

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arXiv2016

Security in The Gaussian Interference Channel: Weak and Moderately Weak Interference Regimes

We consider a secure communication scenario through the two-user Gaussian interference channel: each transmitter (user) has a confidential message to send reliably to its intended receiver while keeping it secret from the other receiver. Prior work investigated the performance of two different approaches for this scenario; i.i.d. Gaussian random codes and real alignment of structured codes. While the latter achieves the optimal sum secure degrees of freedom (s.d.o.f.), its extension to finite SNR regimes is challenging. In this paper, we propose a new achievability scheme for the weak and the moderately weak interference regimes, in which the reliability as well as the confidentiality of the transmitted messages are maintained at any finite SNR value. Our scheme uses lattice structure, structured jamming codewords, and lattice alignment in the encoding and the asymmetric compute-and-forward strategy in the decoding. We show that our lower bound on the sum secure rates scales linearly with log(SNR) and hence, it outperforms i.i.d. Gaussian random codes. Furthermore, we show that our achievable result is asymptotically optimal. Finally, we provide a discussion on an extension of our scheme to K>2 users.

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arXiv2016

Strong Secrecy in Pairwise Key Agreement over a Generalized Multiple Access Channel

This paper considers the problem of pairwise key agreement without public communication between three users connected through a generalized multiple access channel (MAC). While two users control the channel inputs, all three users observe noisy outputs from the channel and each pair of users wishes to agree on a secret key hidden from the remaining user. We first develop a "pre-generated" key-agreement scheme based on secrecy codes for the generalized MAC, in which the channel is only used to distribute pre-generated secret keys. We then extend this scheme to include an additional layer of rate-limited secret-key generation by treating the observed channel outputs as induced sources. We characterize inner and outer bounds on the strong secret-key capacity region for both schemes. For a special case of the "pre-generated" scheme, we obtain an exact characterization. We also illustrate with some binary examples that exploiting the generalized nature of the generalized MAC may lead to significantly larger key-agreement rates.

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arXiv2016

Towards Deploying a Scalable & Robust Vehicular Identity and Credential Management Infrastructure

Several years of academic and industrial research efforts have converged to a common understanding on fundamental security building blocks for the upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. There is a growing consensus towards deploying a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) enables pseudonymous authentication, with standardization efforts in that direction. However, there are still significant technical issues that remain unresolved. Existing proposals for instantiating the VPKI either need additional detailed specifications or enhanced security and privacy features. Equally important, there is limited experimental work that establishes the VPKI efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we are concerned with exactly these issues. We leverage the common VPKI approach and contribute an enhanced system with precisely defined, novel features that improve its resilience and the user privacy protection. In particular, we depart from the common assumption that the VPKI entities are fully trusted and we improve user privacy in the face of an honest-but-curious security infrastructure. Moreover, we fully implement our VPKI, in a standard-compliant manner, and we perform an extensive evaluation. Along with stronger protection and richer functionality, our system achieves very significant performance improvement over prior systems - contributing the most advanced VPKI towards deployment.

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arXiv2015

Pairwise Secret Key Agreement based on Location-derived Common Randomness

A source model of key sharing between three users is considered in which each pair of them wishes to agree on a secret key hidden from the remaining user. There are rate-limited public channels for communications between the users. We give an inner bound on the secret key capacity region in this framework. Moreover, we investigate a practical setup in which localization information of the users as the correlated observations are exploited to share pairwise keys between the users. The inner and outer bounds of the key capacity region are analyzed in this setup for the case of i.i.d. Gaussian observations.

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arXiv2015

Key Agreement over an Interference Channel with Noiseless Feedback: Achievable Region & Distributed Allocation

Secret key establishment leveraging the physical layer as a source of common randomness has been investigated in a range of settings. We investigate the problem of establishing, in an information-theoretic sense, a secret key between a user and a base-station (BS) (more generally, part of a wireless infrastructure), but for two such user-BS pairs attempting the key establishment simultaneously. The challenge in this novel setting lies in that a user can eavesdrop another BS-user communications. It is thus paramount to ensure the two keys are established with no leakage to the other user, in spite the interference across neighboring cells. We model the system with BS-user communication through an interference channel and user-BS communication through a public channel. We find the region including achievable secret key rates for the general case that the interference channel (IC) is discrete and memoryless. Our results are examined for a Gaussian IC. In this setup, we investigate the performance of different transmission schemes for power allocation. The chosen transmission scheme by each BS essentially affects the secret key rate of the other BS-user. Assuming base stations are trustworthy but that they seek to maximize the corresponding secret key rate, a game-theoretic setting arises to analyze the interaction between the base stations.We model our key agreement scenario in normal form for different power allocation schemes to understand performance without cooperation. Numerical simulations illustrate the inefficiency of the Nash equilibrium outcome and motivate further research on cooperative or coordinated schemes.

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arXiv2015

Frequency hopping does not increase anti-jamming resilience of wireless channels

The effectiveness of frequency hopping for anti-jamming protection of wireless channels is analyzed from an information-theoretic perspective. The sender can input its symbols into one of several frequency subbands at a time. Each subband channel is modeled as an additive noise channel. No common randomness between sender and receiver is assumed. It is shown that capacity is positive, and then equals the common randomness assisted (CR) capacity, if and only if the sender power strictly exceeds the jammer power. Thus compared to transmission over any fixed frequency subband, frequency hopping is not more resilient towards jamming, but it does increase the capacity. Upper and lower bounds on the CR capacity are provided.

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arXiv2015

Finite-SNR Regime Analysis of The Gaussian Wiretap Multiple-Access Channel

In this work, we consider a K-user Gaussian wiretap multiple-access channel (GW-MAC) in which each transmitter has an independent confidential message for the receiver. There is also an external eavesdropper who intercepts the communications. The goal is to transmit the messages reliably while keeping them confidential from the eavesdropper. To accomplish this goal, two different approaches have been proposed in prior works, namely, i.i.d. Gaussian random coding and real alignment. However, the former approach fails at moderate and high SNR regimes as its achievable result does not grow with SNR. On the other hand, while the latter approach gives a promising result at the infinite SNR regime, its extension to the finite-SNR regime is a challenging task. To fill the gap between the performance of the existing approaches, in this work, we establish a new scheme in which, at the receiver's side, it utilizes an extension of the compute-and-forward decoding strategy and at the transmitters' side it exploits lattice alignment, cooperative jamming, and i.i.d. random codes. For the proposed scheme, we derive a new achievable bound on sum secure rate which scales with log(SNR) and hence it outperforms the i.i.d. Gaussian codes in moderate and high SNR regimes. We evaluate the performance of our scheme, both theoretically and numerically. Furthermore, we show that our sum secure rate achieves the optimal sum secure degrees of freedom in the infinite-SNR regime.

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arXiv2008

Towards Provable Secure Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Networks

In wireless systems, neighbor discovery (ND) is a fundamental building block: determining which devices are within direct radio communication is an enabler for networking protocols and a wide range of applications. To thwart abuse of ND and the resultant compromise of the dependent functionality of wireless systems, numerous works proposed solutions to secure ND. Nonetheless, until very recently, there has been no formal analysis of secure ND protocols. We close this gap in \cite{asiaccs08}, but we concentrate primarily on the derivation of an impossibility result for a class of protocols. In this paper, we focus on reasoning about specific protocols. First, we contribute a number of extensions and refinements on the framework of [24]. As we are particularly concerned with the practicality of provably secure ND protocols, we investigate availability and redefine accordingly the ND specification, and also consider composability of ND with other protocols. Then, we propose and analyze two secure ND protocols: We revisit one of the protocols analyzed in [24], and introduce and prove correct a more elaborate challenge-response protocol.

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arXiv2008

Secure Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Networks: Formal Investigation of Possibility

Wireless communication enables a broad spectrum of applications, ranging from commodity to tactical systems. Neighbor discovery (ND), that is, determining which devices are within direct radio communication, is a building block of network protocols and applications, and its vulnerability can severely compromise their functionalities. A number of proposals to secure ND have been published, but none have analyzed the problem formally. In this paper, we contribute such an analysis: We build a formal model capturing salient characteristics of wireless systems, most notably obstacles and interference, and we provide a specification of a basic variant of the ND problem. Then, we derive an impossibility result for a general class of protocols we term "time-based protocols," to which many of the schemes in the literature belong. We also identify the conditions under which the impossibility result is lifted. Moreover, we explore a second class of protocols we term "time- and location-based protocols," and prove they can secure ND.

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arXiv2008

Impact of Vehicular Communications Security on Transportation Safety

Transportation safety, one of the main driving forces of the development of vehicular communication (VC) systems, relies on high-rate safety messaging (beaconing). At the same time, there is consensus among authorities, industry, and academia on the need to secure VC systems. With specific proposals in the literature, a critical question must be answered: can secure VC systems be practical and satisfy the requirements of safety applications, in spite of the significant communication and processing overhead and other restrictions security and privacy-enhancing mechanisms impose? To answer this question, we investigate in this paper the following three dimensions for secure and privacy-enhancing VC schemes: the reliability of communication, the processing overhead at each node, and the impact on a safety application. The results indicate that with the appropriate system design, including sufficiently high processing power, applications enabled by secure VC can be in practice as effective as those enabled by unsecured VC.

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