Evaluating Channel Based Relay Attack Detection in the Near-Field

Relay attacks are able to circumvent challenge-response authentication protocols, which are commonly used with RFID and NFC devices to securely interact with the physical world. Ultra-wideband round-trip time distance-bounding is the most prominent solution, but it provides low data rates, short communication distances, and requires dedicated hardware. In this paper we propose a novel symmetric-key protocol that simultaneously provides challenge-response authentication and relay attack detection in the near-field and far-field, through the utilization of a random FIR filter as a challenge. The protocol utilizes the channel estimation in an OFDM communication system to perform the evaluations. To evaluate the performance of the protocol hardware experimentation on software-defined radios is done to observe the false-positivity and false-negativity rates of relay detection under normal communications and a relay attack. The results show that our proposed protocol can detect relay attack in the near-field (≤ 10% false-negativity) at various signal-to-noise ratios.