Secure Neighbor Discovery (SND) ensures that wireless nodes accept only nearby, legitimate peers, a prerequisite for trustworthy coordination and communication in wireless systems. Traditional SND protocols struggle to provide robust security guarantees under realistic propagation and timing constraints, particularly when facing relay and location-spoofing attacks. These weaknesses can result in false neighbor declarations, hence affecting availability in practical deployments. This thesis presents a Ultra-Wideband (UWB)-based SND protocol that utilizes high-precision Time of Flight (ToF) with authenticated message exchanges. The protocol integrates UWB-based ranging with ECDSA-based signatures, nonce-derived session freshness, and encrypted coordinate exchange using ephemeral ECIES, ensuring correctness, availability, and confidentiality in adversarial settings. Experimental results demonstrate centimeter-level ranging accuracy under Line of Sight (LoS) conditions and achieve over 95% protocol success rates under moderate Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) conditions when employing a ±10cm consistency threshold between ToF-based and coordinate-based distances. In multi-node setups, parallel initiators complete discovery within 3s, indicating scalability. Security validation demonstrates resistance to distance-decreasing, relay, and replay attacks via strict ToF bounds and cross-verification of encrypted coordinates-based against measured-based distance. The results demonstrate that UWB-based SND guarantees are practical while maintaining the privacy of exchanged coordinates. The protocol provides a deployable foundation for industrial automation, vehicular networking, and secure indoor access control systems.
Hongshuo Yi (Wed,) studied this question.