Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2009/332

Untraceable RFID protocols are not trivially composable: Attacks on the revision of EC-RAC

Ton van Deursen and Sasa Radomirovic

Abstract: It is well-known that protocols that satisfy a security property when executed in isolation do not necessarily satisfy the same security property when they are executed in an environment containing other protocols.

We demonstrate this fact on a family of recently proposed RFID protocols by Lee, Batina, and Verbauwhede. We invalidate the authentication and untraceability claims made for several of the family's protocols.

We also present man-in-the-middle attacks on untraceability in all of the protocols in the family. Similar attacks can be carried out on some other protocols in the literature, as well.

We briefly indicate how to repair the protocols.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / RFID protocols, authentication, untraceability, compositionality

Date: received 6 Jul 2009, last revised 8 Jul 2009

Contact author: ton vandeursen at uni lu

Available formats: PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: Removed one statement about a candidate hash function.

Version: 20090708:122502 (All versions of this report)

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion