It does this by compelling Party A to follow its message transmission with another: a pattern of energy "pulses" and "silences." Party A's wireless radio computes a hash of the original message, creating a sequence of ones and zeros. For each one, the radio sends a random packet; for each zero, it sends nothing -- it's silent. This combined pattern is unique to the original message.

If the attacker alters the contents of Party A's message, he, too, has to follow up with a new "silence pattern" that corresponds to the altered contents. But the two silence patterns will be different: The attacker "cannot generate silence" from Party A's "one bits." Party B can detect that difference and in effect refuse the connection offered by the attacker.

The second type of tampering is when a man-in-the-middle attacker hides Party A's transmission simply be sending its own packets and creating a collision with it. Party B sees this as a known and common event and ignores the attempted transmission by Party A.

TEP counters this by adding an unusually long, and random, synchronization packet to Party A's transmission. The packet length in effect causes it to "stand out" as not being a collision. Party B looks for these unusually long energy periods and treats them as an attempt by another party to pair with it. The attacker can't hide it by generating collisions, and if he sends his own long packet, Party B can detect it as an "unusual message."

The third tampering technique involves an attacker blocking transmissions by occupying continuously the radio channel, in effect, not giving Party A the chance to "talk" to Party B. TEP counters this by having Party A's radio time out after a known interval and transmit its message even if the channel is occupied.