On the Potential of Distance Bounding based on UWB Received Signal Strength

Distance bounding has gained attention in the last decades due to the increasing need for security in applications, such as contactless payment and keyless access control. In such applications, it is important to verify if the two entities participating in a transaction are geographically close to each other. In other applications, it is critical to guarantee that the two entities are not too close, e.g., human and machines interacting in the same environment. A distance fraud is a known class of attacks in this context, and it has been shown that particular attacks within this class can be successfully applied to any distance estimation approach relying on round-trip time-of-flight measurements. In this paper we discuss the feasibility of detecting such attacks with signal strength estimations, an approach which was deemed unsuitable for distance bounding by previous related studies. We show that our method can detect attacks in case a dishonest prover does not respect the given bounds.