NLHB : A Non-Linear Hopper Blum Protocol

In this paper, we propose a light-weight provably-secure authentication protocol called the NLHB protocol, which is a variant of the HB protocol. The HB protocol uses the complexity of decoding linear codes for security against passive attacks. In contrast, security for the NLHB protocol is proved by reducing passive attacks to the problem of decoding a class of non-linear codes that are provably hard. We demonstrate that the existing passive attacks on the HB protocol family, which have contributed to considerable reduction in its effective key-size, are ineffective against the NLHB protocol. From the evidence, we conclude that smaller-key sizes are sufficient for the NLHB protocol to achieve the same level of passive attack security as the HB Protocol. Further, for this choice of parameters, we provide an implementation instance for the NLHB protocol for which the Prover/Verifier complexity is lower than the HB protocol, enabling authentication on very low-cost devices like RFID tags. Finally, in the spirit of the HB$^{+}$ protocol, we extend the NLHB protocol to the NLHB$^{+}$ protocol and prove security against the class of active attacks defined in the DET Model.