CAREER: A Pathway towards Channel Camouflage and Manipulation Techniques for Wireless Security

Wireless channel exhibits the spatial uncorrelation property, i.e., the characteristic of a wireless channel becomes uncorrelated every half carrier wavelength over distance. This property fertilizes an emerging research area that utilizes wireless channel characteristics to authenticate a wireless transmitter. In addition to transmitter authentication, the spatial uncorrelation property of wireless channel has long served as the security foundation of location distinction techniques, which use changes in wireless channel characteristics to identify location changes of a wireless transmitter. Despite the prevalence of authentication and location distinction schemes based on the spatial uncorrelation property, this research identified an important attack against these schemes. Specifically, an attacker can easily bypass authentication or camouflage location changes by creating an artificial wireless channel similar to the real one.

Based on the unrevealed attack, this project will focus on two important directions of research: (i) it will investigate methods that can enable a receiver to effectively detect the existence of this attack; and (ii) it will also explore how the creation of artificial wireless channels, on the other hand, paves the way for significant advancement in wireless security techniques, such as key establishment and anonymous communication. The project has the potential to substantially improve the security of existing channel based authentication and location distinction approaches, and accordingly impacts wireless security research due to the wide adoption of these approaches in the design of wireless systems. The project also creates a new research direction on creating artificial wireless channels to solve practical wireless security problems. All research results will be freely distributed. This research will be coupled with education and training for introducing students to wireless security research, as well as broadening security education to non-specialists.

Yao Liu