So Near and Yet So Far – Symbolic Verification of Distance-Bounding Protocols

Abstract

The continuous adoption of Near Field Communication (NFC) tags offers many new applications whose security is essential (e.g., contactless payments). In order to prevent flaws and attacks, we develop in this article a framework allowing us to analyse the underlying security protocols, taking into account the location of the agents and the transmission delay when exchanging messages. We propose two reduction results to render automatic verification possible relying on the existing verification tool ProVerif . Our first result allows one to consider a unique topology to catch all possible attacks. The second result simplifies the security analysis when considering Terrorist fraud. Then, based on these results, we perform a comprehensive case study analysis (27 protocols), in which we obtain new proofs of security for some protocols and detect attacks on some others.