Paper 2006/303

Zero-knowledge-like Proof of Cryptanalysis of Bluetooth Encryption

Eric Filiol

Abstract

This paper presents a protocol aiming at proving that an encryption system contains structural weaknesses without disclosing any information on those weaknesses. A verifier can check in a polynomial time that a given property of the cipher system output has been effectively realized. This property has been chosen by the prover in such a way that it cannot been achieved by known attacks or exhaustive search but only if the prover indeed knows some unknown weaknesses that may effectively endanger the cryptosystem security. This protocol has been denoted {\em zero-knowledge-like proof of cryptanalysis}. In this paper, we apply this protocol to the Bluetooth core encryption algorithm E0, used in many mobile environments and thus we prove that its security can seriously be put into question.

Note: This paper has been published in the International Journal in Information Technology, Volume 3, Issue 4, pp. 285 -- 293 and is available at http://www.waset.org/ijit/v3.html A few significant data have been added into the Appendix.