Covert Channels in Privacy-Preserving Identification SystemsAuthors: D. Bailley, D. Boneh, E. Goh, and A. Juels
We examine covert channels in privacy-enhanced mobile identification devices where the devices uniquely identify themselves to an authorized verifier. Such devices (e.g. RFID tags) are increasingly commonplace in hospitals and many other environments. For privacy, the device outputs used for identification should "appear random" to any entity other than the verifier, and should not allow physical tracking of device bearers. Worryingly, there already exist privacy breaches for some devices that allow adversaries to physically track users. Ideally, such devices should allow anyone to publicly determine that the device outputs are covert-channel free (CCF); we say that such devices are CCF-checkable. Our main result shows that there is a fundamental tension between identifier privacy and CCF-checkability; we show that the two properties cannot co-exist in a single system. We also develop a weaker privacy model where a continuous observer can correlate appearances of a given tag, but a sporadic observer cannot. We also construct a privacy-preserving tag identification scheme that is CCF-checkable and prove it secure under the weaker privacy model using a new complexity assumption.
In proceedings of the 14'th ACM conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), pp. 297-306, 2007