International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 19 September 2014

Jean Paul Degabriele, Victoria Fehr, Marc Fischlin, Tommaso Gagliardoni, Felix Günther and
ePrint Report ePrint Report
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 25182-1.2. 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 also discuss countermeasures to our attacks.

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