Drifting Keys: Impersonation detection for constrained devices

Abstract

We introduce Drifting Keys (DKs), a simple new approach to detecting device impersonation. DKs enable detection of complete compromise by an attacker of the device and its secret state, e.g., cryptographic keys. A DK evolves within a device randomly over time. Thus an attacker will create DKs that randomly diverge from those in the original, valid device over time, alerting a trusted verifier to the attack. DKs may be transmitted unidirectionally from a device, eliminating interaction between the device and verifier. Device emissions of DK values can be quite compact - even just a single bit - and DK evolution and emission require minimal computation. Thus DKs are well suited for highly constrained devices, such as sensors and hardware authentication tokens. We offer a formal adversarial model for DKs, and present a simple scheme that we prove essentially optimal (undominated) for a natural class of attack timelines. We explore application of this scheme to one-time passcode authentication tokens. Using the logs of a large enterprise, we experimentally study the effectiveness of DKs in detecting the compromise of such tokens.