Man-in-the-Middle Proof-of-Concept via Krontiris' Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman Over COSE (EDHOC) in C

TL;DR

The paper investigates MitM vulnerabilities in EDHOC-based key exchange for constrained devices and evaluates lawful interception paradigms in B5G contexts using a metasurface-assisted interception framework. It presents a C-based PoC built on Krontiris' EDHOC integrated with the CoopeRIS simulation environment to demonstrate MSitM-enabled interception and weak authentication scenarios. It analyzes LI approaches like the LAKE proposal, highlighting practical trade-offs between compatibility, targeted interception, computational overhead, and multi-party trust requirements. The work emphasizes implications for end-to-end confidentiality in IoT and B5G contexts and proposes directions such as physical-layer anomaly detection and anamorphic encryption to mitigate or detect interception risks.

Abstract

This report presents some technical details on the authentication process of a lightweight key exchange protocol, paying attention on how Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks could undermine its security, e.g., under the scope of lawful interception and its risk to facilitate mass surveillance. We focus only on some technical aspects associated to the attack scenario. Perspectives for future work are also discussed. Other specific aspects of the work, mainly focusing on the security implications of malicious metasurfaces against B5G networks, are excluded from the scope of this report.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Extract of an message exchange and their contents, as defined in EdhocRFC9528.
• Figure 2: -assisted lawful interception attack scenario (cf. companion github repository MitMEdhocGit for further details and videocaptures associated to the attack).
• Figure 3: Sample representation of the attack w.r.t. the intercepted and modified message exchange flows.