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Unpicking PLAID: a cryptographic analysis of an ISO-standards-track authentication protocol

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Abstract

The Protocol for Lightweight Authentication of Identity (PLAID) aims at secure and private authentication between a smart card and a terminal. Originally developed by a unit of the Australian Department of Human Services for physical and logical access control, PLAID has now been standardized as an Australian standard AS-5185-2010 and is currently in the fast-track standardization process for ISO/IEC 25185-1. We present a cryptographic evaluation of PLAID. As well as reporting a number of undesirable cryptographic features of the protocol, we show that the privacy properties of PLAID are significantly weaker than claimed: using a variety of techniques, we can fingerprint and then later identify cards. These techniques involve a novel application of standard statistical and data analysis techniques in cryptography. We discuss potential countermeasures to our attacks and comment on our experiences with the standardization process of PLAID.

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Notes

  1. The standard neither specifies the exact format nor the length of this randomly generated string.

  2. The standard is ambiguous in whether the trial \(\text {KeySetID}\) of the IFD or the value contained in \({}^e\text {STR1}\) is stored.

  3. The standard does not specify what is meant by “authentication fails.” We assume the protocol aborts in this case.

  4. Though referring to ISO/IEC 9797-1 method 2, the PLAID draft standard explicitly describes a different padding method and thus makes unambiguous decoding impossible (cf. Sect. 5.4).

  5. Again, the standard does neither specify the exact format nor the length (note that \(\text {STR3}\) in Step 7 contains a variable sized field \(\text {Payload}\)) of this random byte string.

  6. See  [24] for a good introduction. The name stems from the problem initially being posed as that of estimating the total number of tanks in the German army from observing a subset of their serial numbers.

  7. Note that, in contrast to the first two scenarios, the third scenario and our according lunchtime attack is independent of the overall number of cards in the system.

  8. Recall that terminals announce their supported keysets by sending corresponding \(\text {KeySetID}\)s in the clear. As a consequence, any observer can see which keys are related to which resource/terminal.

  9. We note that the unauthenticated nature of the PLAID protocol messages has already been criticized in the national body comments on an earlier ISO draft [18]. In our attack, we exploit this weakness, refuting the claim of the current ISO draft [19, Annex H.1.1] that sending \({\text {KeySetID}{}\text {s}}\) in clear is “of no use to an attacker.”

  10. For 2048-bit RSA decryptions or signatures, [34] reports times of over 100 ms for mobile devices (without cryptographic coprocessor), while our simulations on an Intel Core i7 2.4 GHz are around 10 ms.

  11. The protocol explicitly notes that no error messages should be issued, but wrong implementations or side-channel attacks may reveal such information.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Pooya Farshim for his contributions during the early stages of this paper, Andrew Waterhouse for providing insights on the ISO standardization process, and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments. Marc Fischlin is supported by the Heisenberg grants Fi 940/3-1 and Fi 940/3-2 of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Tommaso Gagliardoni and Felix Günther are supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within EC SPRIDE. Felix Günther and Giorgia Azzurra Marson are supported by the DFG as part of the CRC 1119 CROSSING. Giorgia Azzurra Marson and Arno Mittelbach are supported by the Hessian LOEWE excellence initiative within CASED. Kenneth G. Paterson and Jean Paul Degabriele are supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Leadership Fellowship EP/H005455/1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Security Group, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK

    Jean Paul Degabriele & Kenneth G. Paterson

  2. Cryptoplexity, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Victoria Fehr, Marc Fischlin, Tommaso Gagliardoni, Felix Günther, Giorgia Azzurra Marson & Arno Mittelbach

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  1. Jean Paul Degabriele
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  2. Victoria Fehr
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Correspondence to Giorgia Azzurra Marson.

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Degabriele, J.P., Fehr, V., Fischlin, M. et al. Unpicking PLAID: a cryptographic analysis of an ISO-standards-track authentication protocol. Int. J. Inf. Secur. 15, 637–657 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10207-015-0309-6

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