In the recent years wireless personal area networks (WPANs) have gained a great popularity. The main reason of this popularity is the ease of use. Yet with the ease use of comes the great security concerns. One of the important concern is a safe association of devices. Without any mechanism for a safe association, these devices are highly vulnerable to a large number of attack. Safe association can be achieved using a secure key establishment between the devices. However, this work will focus on the setting where two wireless devices does not have any prior knowledge and have restricted resources.

The student will firstly provide a review of related work on safe association mechanisms for wireless devices that do not depend on shared cryptographic material. The starting point for the student will be the study and analysis of the vBox mechanism ("Proactively Establishing Secure Channels Between Wireless Devices Without Prior Knowledge", Wang et al., ESORICS 2015).

Secondly, the student shall also carry out a comparative study between non-cryptographic based safe association mechanisms and selected (with approval of the supervisor) cryptographic based safe association mechanisms for wireless devices.