Improved Security Notions and Protocols for Non-transferable Identification

Different security notions and settings for identification protocols have been proposed so far, considering different powerful adversaries that can play “man-in-the-middle” attacks. In this paper we consider one of the strongest forms of these attacks, namely resettably non-transferable identification introduced in [Bellare et al., Eurocrypt 2001]. This notion immunizes a scheme from powerful adversaries that have physical access to the proving device and can thus reset it to a previous state. We discuss some limitations of existing notions as well as different impossibility results for strong notions of non-transferability. We introduce a strong and achievable notion for resettably non-transferable identification that reflects real scenarios more adequately and show a general protocol that satisfies it. We show how to efficiently instantiate our construction and discuss the viability of our protocol for the next generation of electronic passports (e-passports).