Security evaluation of NHB# authentication protocol against a MIM attack

Abstract

NHB# is an authentication protocol dedicated to a specific scenario where an entity with limited computational capabilities proves its identity to a computationally powerful Verifier.The security of NHB# is formally proven against active and restricted man-in-the middle adversaries (GRS MIM), but for the general case, the security has not been evaluated. In this paper, we describe a MIM attack against NHB#, which employs the known MIM attack against HB# as its component, but requires higher complexity due to the inherent nondeterministic properties of the NHB# protocol.