Attacks on a distance bounding protocol

Abstract

Singelée and Preneel have recently proposed a enhancement of Hancke and Kuhn’s distance bounding protocol for RFID. The authors claim that their protocol offers substantial reductions in the number of rounds, though preserving its advantages: suitable to be employed in noisy wireless environments, and requiring so few resources to run that it can be implemented on a low-cost device. Subsequently, the same authors have also proposed it as an efficient key establishment protocol in wireless personal area networks. Nevertheless, in this paper we show effective relay attacks on this protocol, which dramatically increase the success probability of an adversary. As a result, the effectiveness of Singelée and Preneel’s protocol is seriously questioned.