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Out-of-band packet authentication by hardware means

Çağlar Arlı      -    3 Views

Out-of-band packet authentication by hardware means

I'm interested in the topic of using simple hardware means as a sort of out-of-band channel to authenticate packets. This question is rather academic in nature, I don't know of any system like this "in the wild". I can't seem to find much information about such solutions online either, but then again, I don't really know what this is called?

Consider Host X which sends cleartext packets to Host Y via an untrusted network. Let's say that the packets contain a payload and a random number. This random number is additionally transmitted out-of-band from Host X to Host Y by physical/unhackable hardware means. This could be done by a voltage level or hardware binary signals representing the random number.

Host Y will discard the packet if the random numbers don't match.

Is this a secure way to authenticate the packets, or are there flaws in my thinking? Confidentiality is not important.

+-----+
|Host | 
|  X  |------------------------+
+-----+                        |
  |                            |
  |Untrusted Ethernet          /  Hardware means to communicate a "one time secret", 
  |Network                     |  i.e. random number or similar out-of-band          
  |                            |
  V                            |
+-----+                        |
|Host |<-----------------------+
|  Y  |
+-----+