Group distance bounding protocols (Short paper)

Abstract

Distance bounding (DB) protocols allow one entity, the verifier, to securely obtain an upper-bound on the distance to another entity, the prover. Thus far, DB was considered mostly in the context of a single prover and a single verifier. There has been no substantial prior work on secure DB in group settings, where a set of provers interact with a set of verifiers. The need for group distance bounding (GDB) is motivated by many practical scenarios, including: group device pairing, location-based access control and secure distributed localization. This paper addresses, for the first time, one-way GDB protocols by utilizing a new passive DB primitive. We show how passive DB can be used to construct secure and efficient GDB protocols for various one-way GDB settings. We analyze the security and performance of proposed protocols and compare them with existing DB techniques extended to group settings. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.