Dr. Kasper Bonne Rasmussen

"Selected Topics on Wireless Security and Localization"

I will cover a couple of my recent contributions to secure localization and distance bounding. Distance bounding protocols have been proposed for many security critical applications as a means of getting an upper bound on the physical distance to a communication partner. I will show some practical examples of problems where distance bounding can provide a unique solution to problems which are otherwise difficult to solve. One such example is in the context of implantable medical devices.

One of the main obstacles for the wider deployment of distance bounding using electromagnetic (radio) waves, is the lack of hardware platforms that implement and support these protocols. I will show the first prototype system that demonstrates that radio distance bounding protocols can be implemented to match the strict requirements on processing time, that these protocols require. Our system implements a radio that is able to receive, process and transmit signals in less than 1ns.

Finally I will present an area where I see a great potential for future work. In both sensing and actuation applications there is a semantic gap between the electrical system and the physical world. In an adversarial setting this gap can be exploited to make a system believe that, e.g., a switch was activated, when in fact it wasn't. there is a plethora application domains that share this problem, from bio-medical sensors and implantable medical devices to factory control systems and security critical infrastructures. Some of these challenges can be solved using a traditional cryptographic approach, and some are highly interdisciplinary, and will best be handled in collaboration with experts from other fields.

Bio: Kasper Rasmussen received an MSc in Information Technology and Mathematics from the Technical University of Denmark in 2005. He got his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich in 2011. During his Ph.D. he worked on various security issues including secure time synchronization and secure localization with a particular focus on distance bounding. At the end of his Ph.D., Kasper Rasmussen received the ETH Medal for an outstanding dissertation, an award given to 8% of finishing Ph.D. students. Kasper Rasmussen is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Irvine. His research interests include system security and security of wireless networks; security of embedded and cyber-physical systems, including smart grid nodes and hand held devices; protocol design and applied cryptography.