GHB#: a provably secure HB-like lightweight authentication protocol

  • Authors:
  • Panagiotis Rizomiliotis;Stefanos Gritzalis

  • Affiliations:
  • Dep. of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean, Karlovassi, Samos, Greece;Dep. of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean, Karlovassi, Samos, Greece

  • Venue:
  • ACNS'12 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

RFID technology constitutes a fundamental part of what is known as the Internet of Things; i.e. accessible and interconnected machines and everyday objects that form a dynamic and complex environment. In order to secure RFID tags in a cost-efficient manner, the last few years several lightweight cryptography-based tag management protocols have been proposed. One of the most promising proposals is the $\textit{HB}^{+}$ protocol, a lightweight authentication protocol that is supported by an elegant security proof against all passive and a subclass of active attackers based on the hardness of the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) problem. However, the $\textit{HB}^{+}$ was shown to be weak against active man-in-the-middle (MIM) attacks and for that several variants have been proposed. Yet, the vast majority of them has been broken. In this paper, we introduce a new variant of the $\textit{HB}^+$ protocol that can provably resist MIM attacks. More precisely, we improve the security of another recently proposed variant, the $\textit{HB}^\#$ protocol by taking advantage of the properties of the well studied Gold power functions. The new authentication protocol is called $\textit{GHB}^\#$ and its security can be reduced to the LPN problem. Finally, we show that the $\textit{GHB}^\#$ remains practical and lightweight.