2021/03/31 by Eric Wagner, Jan Bauer, Martin Henze · 18 citations
Computer Science · #Authentication (law) #Computer network #Computer science #Computer security #Cryptography #Message authentication code #Mobile Ad Hoc Networks #Network packet #Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks #Parameterized complexity #Resilience (materials science) #Security in Wireless Sensor Networks #Telecommunications #Wireless #cs.CR
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3507657.3528539
ACM WiSec'22
openalex publication_date 2022/05/07 · openalex created_date 2022/05/08 · arxiv created 2022/05/19 · arxiv updated 2022/05/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Message authentication guarantees the integrity of messages exchanged over untrusted channels. However, to achieve this goal, message authentication considerably expands packet sizes, which is especially problematic in constrained wireless environments. To address this issue, progressive message authentication provides initially reduced integrity protection that is often sufficient to process messages upon reception. This reduced security is then successively improved with subsequent messages to uphold the strong guarantees of traditional integrity protection. However, contrary to previous claims, we show in this paper that existing progressive message authentication schemes are highly susceptible to packet loss induced by poor channel conditions or jamming attacks. Thus, we consider it imperative to rethink how authentication tags depend on the successful reception of surrounding packets. To this end, we propose R2-D2, which uses randomized dependencies with parameterized security guarantees to increase the resilience of progressive authentication against packet loss. To deploy our approach to resource-constrained devices, we introduce SP-MAC, which implements R2-D2 using efficient XOR operations. Our evaluation shows that SP-MAC is resilient to sophisticated network-level attacks and operates as resources-conscious and fast as existing, yet insecure, progressive message authentication schemes.