We've Got the Power: Overcoming the Distance Enlargement Fraud with Wireless Power Transfer

Abstract

Distance bounding protocols have been previously introduced to establish upper and lower boundson the distance between two entities. This article demonstrates how coupled transmission techniques, stemming from the domain of wireless power transfer, can be used for distance bounding. The proposed approach can detect and prevent distance enlargement frauds, which were deemed unsolvable for electromagnetic propagation-based distance bounding protocols. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated and evaluated via numerical simulations. The results suggest that the proposed approach is capable of measuring the distance between two devices communicating via inductive coupling with an average accuracy of 8.14cm when using a hardware with 12-bit voltage measurement resolution in the absence of noise.