An Efficient Distance Bounding RFID Authentication Protocol: Balancing False-Acceptance Rate and Memory Requirement

  • Authors:
  • Gildas Avoine;Aslan Tchamkerten

  • Affiliations:
  • Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Telecom ParisTech, Paris, France

  • Venue:
  • ISC '09 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Security
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The Mafia fraud consists in an adversary transparently relaying the physical layer signal during an authentication process between a verifier and a remote legitimate prover. This attack is a major concern for certain RFID systems, especially for payment related applications. Previously proposed protocols that thwart the Mafia fraud treat relaying and non-relaying types of attacks equally: whether or not signal relaying is performed, the same probability of false-acceptance is achieved. Naturally, one would expect that non-relay type of attacks achieve a lower probability of false-acceptance. We propose a low complexity authentication protocol that achieves a probability of false-acceptance essentially equal to the best possible false-acceptance probability in the presence of Mafia frauds. This performance is achieved without degrading the performance of the protocol in the non-relay setting. As an additional feature, the verifier can make a rational decision to accept or to reject a proof of identity even if the protocol gets unexpectedly interrupted.