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Lightweight Authentication Protocols on Ultra-Constrained RFIDs - Myths and Facts

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Radio Frequency Identification: Security and Privacy Issues (RFIDSec 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8651))

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Abstract

While most lightweight authentication protocols have been well analyzed with respect to their security, often only little (or even nothing) is known with respect to their suitability for low-cost RFIDs in the range of $0.05 to $0.10. Probably this is mainly due to the fact that open literature rarely provides information on what conditions need to be met by a scheme in practice, hindering a sound development and analysis of schemes.

We provide a comprehensive collection of several conditions that should be met by lightweight authentication schemes if deployed in low-cost RFID systems. Afterwards, we show that none of the existing authentication protocols that are based on the hardness of the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) problem complies to these conditions, leaving the design of an LPN-based protocol for low-cost RFIDs as an open question.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In [6], it is stated that “in accordance with C1G2, a maximum tag to reader data transmission rate of 640 kbps and a reader to tag data transmission rate of 126 kbps based on equi-probable binary ones and zeros in the transmission can be calculated” and that “performance criteria of an RFID system demand a minimum label reading speed in excess of 200 labels per second”.

  2. 2.

    In [2], a 0.13 \({\upmu }\)m CMOS process is used. For comparison, the AES implementation in [8] is based on a 0.35 \({\upmu }\)m CMOS process and occupies 0.25 mm\(^2\), which “compares roughly to 3400 gate equivalents” in this context.

  3. 3.

    For the sake of simplicity, in this subsection, the term key will always be used to refer to the shared secret’s unique representation as a binary vector in the corresponding scheme, irrespective of potential blow-up measures like, e.g., the use of Toeplitz matrices. In particular, the key size lower bounds the size of the individual key storage required on each tag.

  4. 4.

    At the current state, Lapin was omitted from the table in Appendix B as, according to its authors, it is actually “targeting lightweight tags that are equipped with (small) CPUs” as compared to “ultra constrained tokens (such as RFIDs in the price range of few cents targeting the EPC market)” [17]. (See also [11] for a very recent suggestion of an FPGA implementation for Lapin, which, however, is still not feasible when transferred to low-cost ASICs. Again, the details of this will be discussed in the full version of the paper.)

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Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of RFIDSec 2014 and Gildas Avoine for their helpful comments. Finally, we would also like to express our special thanks to Peter Fischer and Michael Ritzert, who supplied us with the necessary technical means and additional valuable information for actually implementing the discussed protocols.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Frederik Armknecht, Matthias Hamann & Vasily Mikhalev

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  1. Frederik Armknecht
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  3. Vasily Mikhalev
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Correspondence to Matthias Hamann .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer & Information Science, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Alabama, USA

    Nitesh Saxena

  2. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi

Appendices

A Overview of the Considered Protocols

In 2000, the HB [18] protocol was proposed, which is proven to be secure against passive attacks [22]. In order to resist active attacks, \(\text {HB}^{+}\) [20] was introduced that is provably secure in the detection-based model (where the adversary is able to communicate only with the tag before attempting to authenticate itself to the reader). However, if the attacker is given the ability to modify messages which go from the reader to the tag (GRS model), the \(\text {HB}^{+}\) protocol is not secure anymore as it was shown in [12]. As a result, many new HB-type protocols were proposed in order to overcome this and other types of Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. In 2006, the \(\text {HB}^{++}\) protocol was introduced [5], which can be seen as running \(\text {HB}^{+}\) twice with correlated challenges and independent secrets. Later, [30] proposed the \(\text{ HB-MP }\) protocol, which was designed to be more efficient than \(\text {HB}^{+}\) but turned out to be vulnerable w.r.t. certain MITM attacks [13], which is why \(\text{ HB-MP }^+\) [25] has been suggested. Another attempt to improve the performance of \(\text {HB}^{+}\) and to make it resistant against GRS-type MITM attacks was the \(\text {HB}^{*}\) protocol [7]. In 2008, the \(\text {HB}^{\#}\) and RANDOM-\(\text {HB}^{\#}\) protocols were proposed, where the keys were extended from vectors to matrices [14]. Another proposal called Trusted-HB [4] is based on the idea of using a hardware efficient hash function for verifying the integrity of the data in order to resist MITM attacks. PUF-HB [16] is a construction which relies on Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) as a hardware primitive. In the protocols NLHB [27] and GHB# [39], the linear functions are replaced by non-linear functions, while \(\text {HB}^{N}\) [3] can be seen as a bilinear variant of \(\text {HB}^{}\). In 2011, AUTH [23] was proposed, where the security is based on a modified LPN problem, called the subspace LPN problem [33]. One year later, a more efficient proposal building on the ideas from [23] called Lapin [17] was introduced, whose security relies on assumed hardness of the Ring LPN-problem.

B Evaluation Results for the Considered Protocols

Table 3. Evaluation results for the considered HB-type protocols.
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Armknecht, F., Hamann, M., Mikhalev, V. (2014). Lightweight Authentication Protocols on Ultra-Constrained RFIDs - Myths and Facts. In: Saxena, N., Sadeghi, AR. (eds) Radio Frequency Identification: Security and Privacy Issues. RFIDSec 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8651. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13066-8_1

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