Towards secure IFF: preventing mafia fraud attacks

Common identification schemes are vulnerable against real-time attacks, known as mafia frauds: unnoticed, an active adversary relays all messages between the participants - causing a misidentification with fatal consequences. No convincing practical solution is known so far, and even common security proofs explicitly omit such scenarios. We present an identification scheme that solves the problem by hiding the conversation channel between the participants using channel hopping (CH) techniques. Furthermore, we show that the security of our approach is only based on the assumption that an adversary cannot relay all channels of an CH system in parallel. Finally, we point out that the proposed scheme is also essential for a variety of civil applications.