Zero-Communication Seed Establishment for Anti-Jamming Techniques

In an environment perturbed by malicious interference, establishing a reliable wireless connection without shared secrets typically relies on uncoordinated spread spectrum methods, such as UFHSS or UDSSS. These methods offer a lowthroughput channel for the exchange of key contributions with the goal to establish a shared secret. They, however, incur a significant delay when confronted with adversarial jamming, in particular when long public-key credentials must be exchanged. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a scheme that is orders of magnitude more efficient than prior proposals. Drawing on powerful identity-based (ID-based) cryptography and exploiting a-priori knowledge about the identities of the communication partners, the parties can immediately and without any communication derive a cryptographically strong seed (or key) for creating a highthroughput, jamming-resistant channel. Even without a-priori knowledge, our scheme still benefits from the certificate-free authentication offered by ID-based cryptography. Additionally, we define the notion of a secure seed establishment scheme for anti-jamming methods and prove that our protocol satisfies this definition. We further conduct an experimental evaluation of our approach to demonstrate its practicality: on mobile commodity hardware such as notebooks, tablet computers, and smart phones, a non-optimized implementation derives shared seeds in less than half a second.