A formal approach to distance-bounding RFID protocols

Abstract

Distance-bounding protocols aim at impeding man-in-themiddle( MITM) attacks by measuring response times. Three kinds of attacks are usually addressed: (1) Mafia attacks where adversaries relay communication between honest prover and honest verifier in different sessions; (2) Terrorist attacks where adversaries gets limited active support from the prover to impersonate; (3) Distance attacks where a malicious prover claims to be closer to the verifier than it really is. Many protocols in the literature address one or two such threats, but no rigorous security models -nor clean proofs- exist so far. For resource-constrained RFID tags, distance-bounding is more difficult to achieve. Our contribution here is to formally define security against the above-mentioned attacks and to relate the properties. We thus refute previous beliefs about relations between the notions, showing instead that they are independent. Finally we assess the security of the RFID distance-bounding scheme due to Kim and Avoine in our model, and enhance it to include impersonation security and allow for errors due to noisy channel transmissions. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.