Non-uniform Stepping Approach to RFID Distance Bounding Problem

Abstract

RFID systems are vulnerable to relay attacks (mafia fraud and terrorist fraud) as well as distance fraud. Several distance bounding protocols suitable to RFID systems were proposed to avoid these attacks. The common point of these protocols is to try to reduce success probability of the attacker. To the best of our knowledge, there is no RFID distance bounding protocol without final signature that provides success probability of attacker smaller than (3/4)n in the presence of all frauds. In this paper, we propose an RFID distance bounding protocol that creates binary responses by traversing the register with non-uniform steps based on the secret key in addition to binary challenges. Our protocol without final signature is the first to converge the success probability of the attacker to the ideal case, which is (1/2)n for all frauds. Furthermore, our protocol is robust against disturbances of channel, has low computational cost and also provides privacy.