Application of distance bounding protocols with random challenges over RFID noisy communication systems

Distance-bounding protocols are proposed based upon the round trip time measurements of the executed messages to protect radiofrequency identification (RFID) systems against relay attacks. The existing distance-bounding protocols employed by RFID systems are divided into two categories, generally called "with random challenges" and "with mixed challenges". Since RFID systems and distance-bounding protocols are particularly susceptible to noise, in this presentation the security analysis of distance-bounding protocols with random challenges is performed over a noisy channel. This analysis is achieved by computing an attacker's success probability due to Mafia-fraud and distance-fraud attacks in a noisy environment. In this case, the analysis as well as simulation results show that increasing the number of iterations (rounds) makes the attacker's success probability to decrease, and adversely it can cause the rejection probability of a valid tag due to channel errors to increase. Therefore, the proper values for the number of iterations and the total number of errors that are acceptable are computed in order to obtain the optimal false-accept and false-reject probabilities in a noisy environment.