Design and Implementation of a Terrorist Fraud Resilient Distance Bounding System

Abstract

Given the requirements of fast processing and the complexity of RF ranging systems, distance bounding protocols have been challenging to implement so far; only few designs have been proposed and implemented. Currently, the most efficient implementation of distance bounding protocols uses analog processing and enables the prover to receive a message, process it and transmit the reply within 1 ns, two orders of magnitude faster than the most efficient digital implementation. However, even if implementing distance bounding using analog processing clearly provides tighter security guarantees than digital implementations, existing analog implementations do not support resilience against Terrorist Fraud attacks; they protect only against Distance Fraud and Mafia Fraud attacks. We address this problem and propose a new, hybrid digital-analog design that enables the implementation of Terrorist Fraud resilient distance bounding protocols. We introduce a novel attack, which we refer to as the "double read-out" attack and show that our proposed system is also secure against this attack. Our system consists of a prototype prover that provides strong security guarantees: if a dishonest prover performs the Terrorist Fraud attack, it can cheat on its distance bound to the verifier only up to 4.5 m and if it performs Distance Fraud or Mafia Fraud attacks up to 0.41 m. Finally, we show that our system can be used to implement existing (Terrorist Fraud resilient) distance bounding protocols (e.g., the Swiss Knife and Hancke-Kuhn protocol) without requiring protocol modifications.

Terrorist fraud resistance of distance bounding protocols employing physical unclonable functions

“…The prover needs to attest to the verifier that it is closer than a certain maximum distance. In recent years, a number of such distance bounding protocols have been proposed [2]- [4].…”

Towards Quantum Distance Bounding Protocols

“…This approach does not introduce any delay in the time-critical rapid-bit exchange phase, while still allows the prover to prove knowledge of the challenge bits in the last protocol phase. However, Ranganathan et al found that the CRCS implementation is vulnerable to a double read-out attack, which allows an adversary to obtain the values of the prover's two registers simultaneously [6]. Ranganathan et al proposed an hybrid solution -which they call Switched Challenge Reflector with Carrier Shifting (SCRCS) -that prevents the double read-out attack by introducing a new digital component that disables part of the analog circuitry after detecting the challenge [6].…”

“…However, Ranganathan et al found that the CRCS implementation is vulnerable to a double read-out attack, which allows an adversary to obtain the values of the prover's two registers simultaneously [6]. Ranganathan et al proposed an hybrid solution -which they call Switched Challenge Reflector with Carrier Shifting (SCRCS) -that prevents the double read-out attack by introducing a new digital component that disables part of the analog circuitry after detecting the challenge [6]. However, both the analog and hybrid approaches require complex hardware and storage at the prover.…”

“…Brands and Chaum [1] were the first to introduce a DB protocol to counter relay attacks in Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) systems. Subsequently, a number of articles [2,3,4,5,6,7,8] has contributed not only to improve or design new DB protocols, but also to implement these protocols. There are two main families of DB protocols: those that are derived from the protocol proposed by Brands and Chaum [1] and the ones that are based on the protocol proposed by Hancke and Kuhn [2].…”

Distance Lower Bounding

“…Protocols with claimed security against terrorist fraud include [1,23,26,29]. These protocols used different approaches to provide this security.…”