Terrorism in distance bounding: Modeling terrorist-fraud resistance

Abstract

In distance-bounding protocols, verifiers use a clock to measure the time elapsed in challenge-response rounds, thus upper-bounding their distance to the prover. This should prevent man-in-the-middle (MITM) relay attacks. Distance-bounding protocols may aim to prevent several attacks, amongst which terrorist fraud, where a dishonest prover helps the adversary to authenticate, but without passing data that allows the adversary to later authenticate on its own. Two definitions of terrorist-fraud resistance exist: a very strong notion due to Dürholz et al. [6] (which we call SimTF security), and a weaker, fuzzier notion due to Avoine et al. [1]. Recent work [7] indicates that the classical countermeasures to terrorist fraud, though intuitively sound, do not grant SimTF security. Two questions are posed in [7]: (1) Is SimTF security achievable? and (2) Can we find a definition of terrorist-fraud resistance which both captures the intuition behind it and enables efficient constructions? We answer both questions affirmatively. For (1) we show the first provably SimTF secure distance-bounding scheme in the literature, though superior terrorist-fraud resistance comes here at the cost of security. For (2) we provide a game-based definition for terrorist-fraud resistance (called GameTF security) that captures the intuition suggested in [1], is formalized in the style of [6], and is strong enough for practical applications. We also prove that the SimTF-insecure [7] Swiss-Knife protocol is GameTF-secure. We argue that high-risk scenarios require a stronger security level, closer to SimTF security. Our SimTF secure scheme is also strSimTF secure. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.