HB - MAC: Improving the Random - HB# Authentication Protocol

  • Authors:
  • Panagiotis Rizomiliotis

  • Affiliations:
  • Dep. of Inf. and Comm. Syst. Eng., University of the Aegean, Karlovassi, Greece GR-83200

  • Venue:
  • TrustBus '09 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The Random - HB # protocol is a significant improvement of the HB + protocol introduced by Juels and Weis for the authentication of low-cost RFID tags. Random - HB # improves HB + in terms of both security and practicality. It is provably resistant against man-in-the-middle attacks, where the adversary can modify messages send from the reader to the tag and performs significantly better than HB + , since it reduces the transmission costs and provides more practical error rates. The only problem with Random - HB # is that the storage costs for the secret keys are insurmountable to low cost tags. The designers of the protocol have proposed also an enhanced variant which has less storage requirements, but it is not supported by a security proof. They call this variant just HB #. In this paper we propose a variant of the Random - HB #. The new proposal maintains the performance of the Random - HB #, but it requires significantly less storage for the key. To achieve that we add a lightweight message authentication code to protect the integrity of all the exchanged messages.