Abstract. Relay attacks (and, more generally, man-in-the-middle attacks) are a serious threat against many access control and payment schemes. In this work, we present distance-bounding protocols, how these can deter relay attacks, and the security models formalizing these protocols. We show several pitfalls making existing protocols insecure (or at least, vulnerable, in some cases). Then, we introduce the SKI protocol which enjoys resistance to all popular attack-models and features provable security. As far as we know, this is the first protocol with such all-encompassing security guarantees.
Why Distance-Bounding?It is well known that a chess beginner can win against a chess grand-master easily by defeating two grand-masters concurrently, taking different colors in both games, and relaying the move of one master to the other. This is a pure relay attack where two masters play against each other while each of them thinks he is playing against a beginner.In real life, relay attacks find applications in access control. For instance, a car with a wireless key can be opened by relaying the communication between the key (the token) and the car. RFID-based access control to buildings can also be subject to relay attacks [21]. The same goes for (contactless) credit-card payments: a customer may try to pay for something on a malicious terminal which relays to a fake card paying for something more expensive [15].To defeat relay attacks, Brands and Chaum [9] introduced the notion of distance bounding protocol. This relies on the fact that information is local and it cannot travel faster than light. So, an RFID reader can identify when participants are close enough because the round-trip communication time has been small enough. The idea is that a prover holding a key x proves to a verifier that he is close to him. Ideally, this notion should behave like a traditional interactive proof system in the sense that it must satisfy:-completeness (i.e., an honest prover close to the verifier will pass the protocol with high probability)This invited paper summarizes results from [4,5,6,7,8].