A Symbolic Framework to Analyse Physical Proximity in Security Protocols

Abstract

For many modern applications like e.g., contactless payment, and keyless systems, ensuring physical proximity is a security goal of paramount importance. Formal methods have proved their usefulness when analysing standard security protocols. However, existing results and tools do not apply to e.g., distance bounding protocols that aims to ensure physical proximity between two entities. This is due in particular to the fact that existing models do not represent in a faithful way the locations of the participants, and the fact that transmission of messages takes time. In this paper, we propose several reduction results: when looking for an attack, it is actually sufficient to consider a simple scenario involving at most four participants located at some specific locations. These reduction results allow one to use verification tools (e.g. ProVerif, Tamarin) developed for analysing more classical security properties. As an application, we analyse several distance bounding protocols, as well as a contactless payment protocol