Distance Bounding in Noisy Environments

Location information can be used to enhance mutual entity authentication protocols in wireless ad-hoc networks. More specifically, distance bounding protocols have been introduced by Brands and Chaum at Eurocrypt’93 to preclude distance fraud and mafia fraud attacks, in which a local impersonator exploits a remote honest user. Hancke and Kuhn have proposed a solution to cope with noisy channels. This paper presents an improved distance bounding protocol for noisy channels that offers a substantial reduction (about 50%) in the number of communication rounds compared to the Hancke and Kuhn protocol. The main idea is to use binary codes to correct bit errors occurring during the fast bit exchanges. Our protocol is perfectly suitable to be employed in low-cost, noisy wireless environments.