Abstract
We propose a lightweight, anonymous authentication protocol that can be based on any block cipher and is suitable for use by, e.g., RFID tags. We formally define three security properties that our protocol is intended to satisfy—mutual authentication, anonymity, and desynchronization resilience—and prove concrete bounds on the probability the protocol satisfies these properties in the presence of an active attacker. Our protocol is more efficient than any other protocol we are aware of that achieves these three properties.
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Notes
- 1.
In practice, there may be multiple physical readers all communicating with a single back-end server. The server in that case then plays the role of the reader.
- 2.
A session identifier need not be output in the real-world protocol; we use it to define mutual authentication.
- 3.
For simplicity, we assume the reader sends the first message of the protocol (as is the case for our protocol).
- 4.
In the real world the tag might implement a “time-out” mechanism that would have the same effect.
- 5.
“Time” can be quantified by the number of oracle queries made at some point in the experiment.
- 6.
Because messages may be dropped, the counter stored at the reader may be greater than the counter stored by the tag. But the protocol ensures that the difference between the counters is at most one.
- 7.
At initialization time, the two vectors stored by the reader are redundant; following a successful execution of the protocol, however, the first vector will store values associated with the current counter, while the second will store values associated with the previous counter.
- 8.
If the reader took branch 3(b) then this step is redundant and can be skipped.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Kelley Burgin for suggesting the problem, and Doug Shors, Laurie Law, and Louis Wingers for their encouragement as well as their helpful comments on earlier drafts. This work was performed under a consultancy agreement with University Technical Services, Inc. on behalf of the National Security Agency.
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Katz, J. (2022). A Provably Secure, Lightweight Protocol for Anonymous Authentication. In: Galdi, C., Jarecki, S. (eds) Security and Cryptography for Networks. SCN 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13409. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14791-3_12
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