So near and yet so far - Symbolic verification of distance-bounding protocols

Alexandre Debant (1, 2, 3) , Stéphanie Delaune (1, 2, 3) , Cyrille Wiedling (4)

1 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
2 IRISA-D1 - SYSTÈMES LARGE ÉCHELLE
3 EMSEC - Embedded Security and Cryptography / Sécurité cryptographie embarquée
4 DGA.MI - DGA Maîtrise de l'information

The rise of new technologies, and in particular Near Field Communication (NFC) tags, offers new applications such as contactless payments, key-less entry systems, transport ticketing. .. Due to their security concerns, new security protocols, called distance-bounding protocols, have been developed to ensure physical proximity of the devices during a session. In order to prevent flaws and attacks, these protocols require formal verification. In this paper, we propose a new symbolic model allowing us to take into account the location of the agents and to model the fact that transmitting a message takes time. We propose two reduction results to render automatic verification possible relying on the existing verification tool ProVerif. Then, we perform a comprehensive case studies analysis (more than 25 protocols) relying on our new framework and its integration in ProVerif. We obtain new proofs of security for some protocols and detect attacks on some others.

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Alexandre Debant, Stéphanie Delaune, Cyrille Wiedling. So near and yet so far - Symbolic verification of distance-bounding protocols. [Research Report] Univ Rennes, CNRS, IRISA, France. 2020. ⟨hal-02965322v1⟩