SPEAKER: Kristiyan Haralambiev NYU TITLE: HB and HB+: Authentication Protocols for Low-Cost Devices ABSTRACT: At Crypto 2005, Juels and Weis (building on prior work of Hopper and Blum) proposed and analyzed two shared-key authentication protocols HB and HB+ whose extremely low computational cost makes them attractive for low-cost devices such as radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. Security of these protocols is based on the conjectured hardness of the learning parity with noise" (LPN) problem: the HB protocol is proven secure against a passive (eavesdropping) adversary, while the HB+ protocol is proven secure against active attacks. Juels and Weis prove security of these protocols only for the case of sequential executions, and explicitly leave open the question of whether security holds also in the case of parallel or concurrent executions. Using a recent result by Regev (STOC 2005) regarding the LPN problem, Katz and Shin answered the aforementioned question in the affirmative and proved security of the HB and HB+ protocols under parallel/concurrent executions. Furthermore, Gilbert, Robshaw, and Sibert have proven that the detection-based model in the papers above is vulnerable to a simple active attack. So, it is interesting open problem whether there is an efficient protocol based on the LPN problem that is resistant to man-in-the-middle attacks.