On the Bright Side of Darkness: Side-Channel Based Authentication Protocol Against Relay Attacks

Abstract

Relay attacks are nowadays well known and most designers of secure authentication protocols are aware of them. At present, the main methods to prevent these attacks are based on the so-called distance bounding technique which consists in measuring the round-trip time of the exchanged authentication messages between the prover and the verifier to estimate an upper bound on the distance between these entities. Based on this bound, the verifier checks if the prover is sufficiently close by to rule out an unauthorized entity. Recently, a new work has proposed an authentication protocol that surprisingly uses the side-channel leakage to prevent relay attacks. In this paper, we exhibit some practical and security issues of this protocol and provide a new one that fixes all of them. Then, we argue the resistance of our proposal against both side-channel and relay attacks under some realistic assumptions. Our experimental results show the efficiency of our protocol in terms of false acceptance and false rejection rates.