Authentication in Constrained Settings

Access to restricted services and/or places requires authentication. However, authentication is sometimes performed in: i) noisy conditions, ii) hostile environments and iii) constrained settings. By noisy conditions, we refer to noise in the communication channel that may lead to modification of the transmitted information. By hostile environments we mainly refer to environments where attackers may attempt to impersonate legitimate users, while by constrained settings we refer to environments that may include communication among wireless devices with limited resources. Authentication is a decision making problem where we need to decide whether or not to accept the credentials of an identity-carrying entity. In the context of cryptographic authentication, we have extensively investigated the family of distance bounding protocols. These can be used as the main countermeasure against relay attacks. We analyse the security of such protocols. These authentication problems will also be briefly connected to the problem of privacy-preservation.