Distance Bounding in Noisy Environments

Abstract

Abstract. Location information can be used to enhance mutual entity authentication protocols in wireless ad-hoc networks. More specifically, distance bounding protocols have been introduced by Brands and Chaum at Eurocrypt'93 to preclude distance fraud and mafia fraud attacks, in which a local impersonator exploits a remote honest user. Hancke and Kuhn have extended these protocols to cope with noisy channels. This paper presents an improved distance bounding protocol for noisy channels that offers a substantial reduction in the number of communication rounds compared to the Hancke and Kuhn protocol. The main idea is to use binary codes to correct bit errors occurring during the fast bit exchanges. Our protocol is perfectly suitable to be employed in noisy wireless environments such as RFID.

The Swiss-Knife RFID Distance Bounding Protocol

“…However the proof based on measuring signal strength is not secure as an adversary can easily amplify signal strength as desired or use stronger signals to read from afar. Therefore many works are devoted to devise efficient distance bounding protocols by measuring round-trip time [2,3,7,10,11,4,[14][15][16].…”

“…A solution to reduce the aforementioned probability below 3 4 is to include a signing message (or message authentication code) as used in other protocols [2,14,15]. However a signing message could not be sent with the channel for fast bit exchanges as it is very sensitive to the background noise.…”

“…Singelée and Preneel proposed a noise resilient protocol in 2007 [14]. They used error correcting code (ECC) and MAC for the sake of channel error resistance, but this made the protocol slower.…”

A secure distance-based RFID identification protocol with an off-line back-end database

“…In this case, the fast phase allows the verifier to check both authentication and distance. Most of existing works derive from either Brands and Chaum's protocol [45,54,57,71] or Hancke and Kuhn's protocol [3,43,60,67,74]. The proposal in [77] is from this perspective an ''hybrid'' protocol.…”

“…However, the feasibility of the scheme is questionable since it requires three physical states {0, 1, void}. Singelee and Preneel [71] proposed a distance-bounding protocol, which uses an error correction code to facilitate the corrections of errors (in noisy channels) during the rapid bit exchange. Nevertheless, this scheme's security and implementation cost on RFID tags is questioned in [55].…”