A Novel Demodulation Scheme for Secure and Reliable UWB Distance Bounding

Abstract: Relay attacks pose an important threat in wireless ranging and authentication systems. Distance bounding protocols have been proposed as an effective countermeasure against these attacks and allow a verifier and a prover to establish an upper bound on the distance between them. However, secure distance bounding protocols are hard to realize in practice due to stringent implementation requirements. In this paper, we look into a yet unexplored research area and show how the security strength of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) distance bounding protocols can be significantly increased by imposing several additional security constraints during demodulation and decoding at the receiver. We demonstrate that for equal reliability metrics as in state-of-the-art UWB distance bounding protocols, our solution achieves a reduction of the success probability of a relay attack by a factor of 40. Moreover, we also argue that our security solution only needs to be combined with pulse masking and a distance commitment to achieve these security bounds and there is no need to have pulse reordering in our modulation.