Symbolic Verification of Distance Bounding Protocols

Abstract

With the proliferation of contactless applications, obtaining reliable information about distance is becoming an important security goal, and specific protocols have been designed for that purpose. These protocols typically measure the round trip time of messages and use this information to infer a distance. Formal methods have proved their usefulness when analysing standard security protocols such as confidentiality or authentication protocols. However, due to their abstract communication model, existing results and tools do not apply to distance bounding protocols. In this paper, we consider a symbolic model suitable to analyse distance bounding protocols, and we propose a new procedure for analysing (a bounded number of sessions of) protocols in this model. The procedure has been integrated in the Akiss tool and tested on various distance bounding and payment protocols (e.g. MasterCard, NXP).