Authenticating Pervasive Devices with Human Protocols

Forgery and counterfeiting are emerging as serious security risks in low-cost pervasive computing devices. These devices lack the computational, storage, power, and communication resources necessary for most cryptographic authentication schemes. Surprisingly, low-cost pervasive devices like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags share similar capabilities with another weak computing device: people. These similarities motivate the adoption of techniques from human-computer security to the pervasive computing setting. This paper analyzes a particular human-to-computer authentication protocol designed by Hopper and Blum (HB), and shows it to be practical for low-cost pervasive devices. We offer an improved, concrete proof of security for the HB protocol against passive adversaries. This paper also offers a new, augmented version of the HB protocol, named HB+, that is secure against active adversaries. The HB+ protocol is a novel, symmetric authentication protocol with a simple, low-cost implementation. We prove the security of the HB+ protocol against active adversaries based on the hardness of the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) problem.

[1]  Donald W. Davies,et al.  Advances in Cryptology — EUROCRYPT ’91 , 2001, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[2]  Burton S. Kaliski.  Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO '97 , 1997 .

[3]  Matthieu Finiasz,et al.  How to Achieve a McEliece-Based Digital Signature Scheme , 2001, ASIACRYPT.

[4]  G. A. Miller.  THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW THE MAGICAL NUMBER SEVEN, PLUS OR MINUS TWO: SOME LIMITS ON OUR CAPACITY FOR PROCESSING INFORMATION 1 , 1956 .

[5]  Hans van Maaren,et al.  A two phase algorithm for solving a class of hard satissfiability problems , 1998 .

[6]  Manuel Blum,et al.  A Secure Human-Computer Authentication Scheme , 2000 .

[7]  Paul Müller,et al.  Hash-based enhancement of location privacy for radio-frequency identification devices using varying identifiers , 2004, IEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, 2004. Proceedings of the Second.

[8]  Markus G. Kuhn,et al.  Low Cost Attacks on Tamper Resistant Devices , 1997, Security Protocols Workshop.

[9]  Christof Paar,et al.  Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems - CHES 2002 , 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[10]  T. Hwang,et al.  On the Matsumoto and Imai human identification scheme , 1995 .

[11]  Elwyn R. Berlekamp,et al.  On the inherent intractability of certain coding problems (Corresp.) , 1978, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[12]  Frank Stajano.  Security in Pervasive Computing , 2003, SPC.

[13]  Tsutomu Matsumoto,et al.  Human-computer cryptography: an attempt , 1998, CCS '96.

[14]  Ari Juels,et al.  "Yoking-proofs" for RFID tags , 2004, IEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, 2004. Proceedings of the Second.

[15]  Moni Naor,et al.  Visual Authentication and Identification , 1997, CRYPTO.

[16]  Colin Boyd,et al.  Advances in Cryptology - ASIACRYPT 2001 , 2001 .

[17]  R. Sorelle.  US Department of Health and Human Services gives states wider latitude in choosing services to be covered by Medicaid. , 2001, Circulation.

[18]  Alfredo De Santis,et al.  Advances in Cryptology — EUROCRYPT'94 , 1994, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[19]  Uwe Hansmann,et al.  Pervasive Computing , 2003 .

[20]  M. Trick,et al.  Cliques, Coloring, and Satisfiability: Second DIMACS Implementation Challenge, Workshop, October 11-13, 1993 , 1996 .

[21]  Johan Håstad,et al.  Some optimal inapproximability results , 2001, JACM.

[22]  O. Antoine,et al.  Theory of Error-correcting Codes , 2022 .

[23]  Matthew J. B. Robshaw,et al.  An Active Attack Against HB +-A Provably Secure Lightweight Authentication Protocol , 2022 .

[24]  Ronald L. Rivest,et al.  The blocker tag: selective blocking of RFID tags for consumer privacy , 2003, CCS '03.

[25]  Ari Juels,et al.  Squealing Euros: Privacy Protection in RFID-Enabled Banknotes , 2003, Financial Cryptography.

[26]  Florent Chabaud,et al.  On the Security of Some Cryptosystems Based on Error-correcting Codes , 1994, EUROCRYPT.

[27]  Michael Kearns,et al.  Efficient noise-tolerant learning from statistical queries , 1993, STOC.

[28]  T. Land.  Combating counterfeit drugs , 1992, Nature.

[29]  Tzonelih Hwang,et al.  On the Matsumoto and Imai's Human Identification Scheme , 1995, EUROCRYPT.

[30]  István Vajda,et al.  Lightweight Authentication Protocols for Low-Cost RFID Tags , 2003 .

[31]  Jean-Jacques Quisquater,et al.  Advances in Cryptology — EUROCRYPT ’95 , 2001, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[32]  Matthew Green,et al.  Security Analysis of a Cryptographically-Enabled RFID Device , 2005, USENIX Security Symposium.

[33]  Ari Juels,et al.  Minimalist Cryptography for Low-Cost RFID Tags , 2004, SCN.

[34]  Jacques Stern,et al.  A new paradigm for public key identification , 1996, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[35]  Richard J. Lipton,et al.  Cryptographic Primitives Based on Hard Learning Problems , 1993, CRYPTO.

[36]  Daniel W. Engels,et al.  RFID Systems and Security and Privacy Implications , 2002, CHES.

[37]  Hideki Imai,et al.  Human Identification Through Insecure Channel , 1991, EUROCRYPT.

[38]  Manuel Blum,et al.  Self-testing/correcting with applications to numerical problems , 1990, STOC '90.

[39]  James M. Crawford,et al.  The Minimal Disagreement Parity Problem as a Hard Satisfiability Problem , 1995 .

[40]  Douglas R. Stinson,et al.  Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO’ 93 , 2001, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[41]  David S. Johnson,et al.  Cliques, Coloring, and Satisfiability , 1996 .

[42]  Sandra Dominikus,et al.  Strong Authentication for RFID Systems Using the AES Algorithm , 2004, CHES.

[43]  David A. Wagner,et al.  Privacy and security in library RFID: issues, practices, and architectures , 2004, CCS '04.

[44]  Ronald L. Rivest,et al.  Security and Privacy Aspects of Low-Cost Radio Frequency Identification Systems , 2003, SPC.

[45]  Christian Floerkemeier,et al.  Issues with RFID Usage in Ubiquitous Computing Applications , 2004, Pervasive.

[46]  Manuel Blum,et al.  Secure Human Identification Protocols , 2001, ASIACRYPT.