Mutual Distance Bounding Protocols enable entities to determine an upper bound on their physical distance and authenticate each other. They have been actively researched due to distance-based attacks on wireless systems like RFID. While most protocols provide unilateral authentication of a tag to a reader, one was proposed to provide mutual authentication with a lower false acceptance rate. However, this analysis is shown to overestimate security, as a new attack achieves a higher false acceptance rate. A method is also introduced to modify existing unilateral authentication protocols into mutual authentication protocols.

1. Mutual Distance Bounding Protocols
A distance bounding protocol enables one entity to determine an upper bound on the physical
distance to the other entity as well as to authenticate the other entity. It has been actively
researched during the recent years as distance-based attacks like Mafia fraud attacks become a
threat in wireless environment, especially in RFID systems. Almost all distance bounding
protocols deal with unilateral authentication as they consider authentication of a passive RFID
tag to a reader. Recently a distance bounding protocol providing mutual authentication has been
proposed by Yum et al. asserting that it provides a lower false acceptance rate under Mafia fraud
attack. However, we show in two ways that their security margins have been overestimated. First
we show that their analysis is not correct. Secondly we introduce a new attack that achieves a
higher false acceptance rate. Furthermore, we introduce a method that can modify existing
distance bounding protocols with unilateral authentication to ones providing mutual
authentication.
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