Security in wireless networks is a notorious problem, suffering from the following dilemma: On the one hand the wireless medium access puts the attacker into a much better position, on the other hand wireless devices most often have resource deficiencies (processing, memory, energy) which make strong attack countermeasures based on cryptographic solutions impossible. Though, there have been many approaches towards lightweight security for wireless networks, this dilemma always persists, at least for the low-cost sector, say, for example, sensor networks or RFIDs.
So far the overwhelming majority of wireless security approaches followed a conventional security paradigm which abstracts the physical communication as a logical channel. We depart from this paradigm, and try to leverage from the physical characteristics of wireless communications as much as possible, thus bringing us again in equality of arms with the attacker. This we coined the security by wireless principle.
In the talk, several incarnations of the security by wireless principle are presented. These are taken from WLAN as well as wireless sensor network scenarios and show for different security goals that security by wireless designs can lead to interesting security solutions.