A Novel RFID Distance Bounding Protocol Based on Physically Unclonable Functions

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems are vulnerable to relay attacks (i.e., mafia, terrorist and distance frauds) when they are used for authentication purposes. Distance bounding protocols are particularly designed as a countermeasure against these attacks. These protocols aim to ensure that the tags are in a distant area by measuring the round-trip delays during a rapid challenge-response exchange of short authenticated messages. Terrorist fraud is the most challenging attack to avoid, because a legitimate user (a tag owner) collaborates with an attacker to defeat the authentication system. Many RFID distance bounding protocols have been proposed recently, with encouraging results. However, none of them provides the ideal security against the terrorist fraud. Motivated by this need, we first introduce a strong adversary model for Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) based authentication protocol in which the adversary has access to volatile memory of the tag. We show that the security of Sadeghi et al.’s PUF based authentication protocol is not secure in this model. We provide a new technique to improve the security of their protocol. Namely, in our scheme, even if an adversary has access to volatile memory she cannot obtain all long term keys to clone the tag. Next, we propose a novel RFID distance bounding protocol based on PUFs which satisfies the expected security requirements. Comparing to the previous protocols, the use of PUFs in our protocol enhances the system in terms of security, privacy and tag computational overhead. We also prove that our extended protocol with a final signature provides the ideal security against all those frauds, remarkably the terrorist fraud. Besides that, our protocols enjoy the attractive properties of PUFs, which provide the most cost efficient and reliable means to fingerprint chips based on their physical properties

Security and privacy in RFID systems

RFID is a leading technology that has been rapidly deployed in several daily life applications such as payment, access control, ticketing, e-passport, supply-chain, etc. An RFID tag is an electronic label that can be attached to an object/individual in order to identify or track the object/individual through radio waves. Security and privacy are two major concerns in several applications as the tags are required to provide a proof of identity. The RFID tags are generally not tamper-resistant against strong adversarial attacks. They also have limited computational resources. Therefore, the design of a privacy preserving and cost-effective RFID authentication protocol is a very challenging task for industrial applications. Moreover, RFID systems are also vulnerable to relay attacks (i.e., mafia, terrorist and distance frauds) when they are used for authentication purposes. Distance bounding protocols are particularly designed as a countermeasure against these attacks. These protocols aim to ensure that the tags are in a bounded area by measuring the round-trip delays during a rapid challenge-response exchange of short authentication messages. Several RFID distance bounding protocols have been proposed recently in the literature. However, none of them provides the ideal security against the terrorist fraud. Besides, the requirements of low resources and inefficient data management trigger to make use of cloud computing technology in RFID authentication systems. However, as more and more information on individuals and companies is placed in the cloud, concerns about data safety and privacy raise. Therefore, while integrating cloud services into RFID authentication systems, the privacy of tag owner against the cloud must also be taken into account. Motivated by this need, this dissertation contributes to the design of algorithms and protocols aimed at dealing with the issues explained above. First of all, we introduce two privacy models for RFID authentication protocols based on Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF). We propose several authentication protocols in order to demonstrate these models. Moreover, we study distance bounding protocols having bit-wise fast phases and no final signature. We give analysis for the optimal security limits of the distance bounding protocols. Furthermore, we propose a novel RFID distance bounding protocol based on PUFs and it satisfies the highest security levels. Finally, we provide a new security and privacy model for integrating cloud computing into RFID systems. For the sake of demonstration of this model, we also propose two RFID authentication protocols that require various computational resources and provide different privacy levels

A framework for analyzing RFID distance bounding protocols

Many distance bounding protocols appropriate for the RFID technology have been proposed recently. Unfortunately, they are commonly designed without any formal approach, which leads to inaccurate analyzes and unfair comparisons. Motivated by this need, we introduce a unied framework that aims to improve analysis and design of distance bounding protocols. Our framework includes a thorough terminology about the frauds, adversary, and prover, thus disambiguating many misleading terms. It also explores the adversary's capabilities and strategies, and addresses the impact of the prover's ability to tamper with his device. It thus introduces some new concepts in the distance bounding domain as the black-box and white-box models, and the relation between the frauds with respect to these models. The relevancy and impact of the framework is nally demonstrated on a study case: Munilla-Peinado distance bounding protocol

Optimal security limits of RFID distance bounding protocols

In this paper, we classify the RFID distance bounding protocols having bitwise fast phases and no final signature. We also give the theoretical security bounds for two specific classes, leaving the security bounds for the general case as an open problem. As for the classification, we introduce the notion of k-previous challenge dependent (k-PCD) protocols where each response bit depends on the current and k-previous challenges and there is no final signature. We treat the case k = 0, which means each response bit depends only on the current challenge, as a special case and define such protocols as current challenge dependent (CCD) protocols. In general, we construct a trade-off curve between the security levels of mafia and distance frauds by introducing two generic attack algorithms. This leads to the conclusion that CCD protocols cannot attain the ideal security against distance fraud, i.e. 1/2, for each challenge-response bit, without totally losing the security against mafia fraud. We extend the generic attacks to 1-PCD protocols and obtain a trade-off curve for 1-PCD protocols pointing out that 1-PCD protocols can provide better security than CCD protocols. Thereby, we propose a natural extension of a CCD protocol to a 1-PCD protocol in order to improve its security. As a study case, we give two natural extensions of Hancke and Kuhn protocol to show how to enhance the security against either mafia fraud or distance fraud without extra cost

Expected loss analysis of thresholded authentication protocols in noisy conditions

A number of authentication protocols have been proposed recently, where at least some part of the authentication is performed during a phase, lasting $n$ rounds, with no error correction. This requires assigning an acceptable threshold for the number of detected errors. This paper describes a framework enabling an expected loss analysis for all the protocols in this family. Furthermore, computationally simple methods to obtain nearly optimal value of the threshold, as well as for the number of rounds is suggested. Finally, a method to adaptively select both the number of rounds and the threshold is proposed.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures; draf

Grouping-Proof Protocol for RFID Tags: Security Definition and Scalable Construction

In this paper, we propose a grouping-proof protocol for RFID tags based on secret sharing. Our proposed protocol addresses the scalability issue of the previous protocols by removing the need for an RFID reader to relay messages from one tag to another tag. We also present a security model for a secure grouping-proof protocol which properly addresses the so called \emph{mafia fraud atttack}. Mafia fraud attack (sometimes called distance fraud) is a simple relay attack suggested by Yvo Desmedt. Any location-based protocol including RFID protocols is vulnerable to this attack even if cryptography is used. One practical countermeasure to mafia fraud attack is to employ a distance-bounding protocol into a location-based protocol. However, in the light of work by Chandran et al., mafia fraud attack cannot be theoretically prevented. Therefore, we need to take hits fact into account in order to make sense about security notion for secure grouping-proof protocols