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Australian Gov't Offers $560k Cryptographic Protocol For Free
mask.of.sanity writes "Australia's national welfare agency will release its 'unbreakable' AU$560,000 smart card identification protocol for free. The government agency wants other departments and commercial businesses to adopt the Protocol for Lightweight Authentication of ID (PLAID), which withstood three years of design and testing by Australian and American security agencies. The agency has one of Australia's most advanced physical and logical converged security systems: staff can access doors and computers with a single centrally-managed identity card, and user identities can be automatically updated as employees leave, are recruited or move to new departments. PLAID, which will be available soon, is to be used in the agency's incoming fleet of contact-less smartcards that are currently under trial by staff. It will replace existing identity cards that operate on PKI encryption."
Can it be referred to as the Former Lightweight Authentication of ID, or FLACID?
That's a much better acronym than the originally proposed Protocol for Automated National Identification and Control.
Or the lesser known Protocol for Enhanced Network and Internet Security.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
"Here, have my lock and key. Nobody will be able to get into your home. Except, maybe, me :-)"
That looks familiar but I can't remember the name, what scheme is it?
That's not strictly true. Although the discrete log problem is hard it is still a computational assumption. Proving that 2^n is a lower bound would be a significant achievement. This scheme is only "unbreakable" in the sense that RSA is - breaking it requires solving a problem that we suspect, but are unable to prove, is very hard.
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There are secrets in the cards, an RSA private key and an AES master key. The bigger problem is keeping these secrets in the cards and distributing the keys to cards. The PLAID protocol has no bearing on these matters.
Which is fine, because those problems are easily solved.
Commercially-available smart cards provide a rather high degree of security. Extracting keys from them isn't impossible (nothing is), but it is very difficult and expensive. I design high security systems for a living, and we have no concerns about the security of the cards themselves, because experience shows it's just not an issue.
What we do focus on is the security of the issuance process, because that's where those keys get injected. That problem is also solvable, mainly by performing the key injection in secure facilities using highly secure devices (FIPS 140-2 level 4 certified hardware security modules). It's expensive and complex (from a management and process perspective, not a technical perspective), but a high degree of security is achievable.
The protocol looks unremarkable. They pass some entropy and IDs back and forth, using conventional standards based encryption and hash algorithms.
It is unremarkable, which is one of its most significant strengths. It's just a lighter-weight approach to the problem, one that can be implemented efficiently on current-generation hardware. Previously, PK authentication on smart cards was considered too slow to use for physical access control and other applications where sub-second authentication was required. Faster smart cards coupled with a lightweight authentication protocol mean that PK authentication can be completed reliably in as little as 200 ms. That's fast enough to use it for transit applications.
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