Identification codes in cryptographic protocols

Identification codes were introduced by Ahlswede and Dueck more than twenty years ago. There is today a lot of studies to identify objects such as contactless devices (for instance RFID tags) but, surprisingly, no one has considered the use of this kind of codes in the literature for that purpose until the recent work of Bringer et al. at Indocrypt ´09. We here show how the security of these new identification protocols is related to some well-known problems in coding theory. We also extend the original proposal to a new problem.