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.