ESC: An efficient, scalable, and crypto-less solution to secure wireless networks

In this paper we present ESC: an efficient, scalable, and crypto-less solution for the establishment of a secure wireless network (that is, a network where, for any pair of nodes, there exists a path composed of encrypted links). ESC guarantees the security of the 90% of the network scenario in the presence of 4 global eavesdropper adversaries with about 370 local peer-to-peer communications avoiding both pre-shared secrets and cryptographic functions. The founding block of our proposal is inspired by COKE [1], where the bits of the secret key associated to a link are generated via a multi-round protocol that, at each round, leverages just channel anonymity. Starting from this founding block, we further provide several relevant contributions: we devise a theoretical model and prove a lower bound for the probability to establish a safe-link in the presence of a global eavesdropper adversary. Further, we study the emergent property of network security achieved via the local property of safe-link establishment. To characterize this feature, we introduce two intuitive and useful metrics: network safety and largest safe component, both aimed at capturing the security features provided by ESC. The thorough theoretical analysis of our proposal, the security proof (under the Canetti-Krawczyk model) supporting our key establishment protocol, as well as our extensive simulations showing the effectiveness and efficiency of our protocol for a wide range of network configuration parameters, make our proposal a viable solution to enforce the security of real networks, other than paving the way for further research in this field.