A Secure Mutually Authenticated Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Protocol

Abstract

Nowadays, the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is widely used in lots of applications. For example, it can be used in inventory control system, supermarket, healthcare and smart cards. It has been used in many other daily life applications and become an essential technology to enhance the standards of human living. As this technology has several benefits, this technology also suffer from security issues such as replay attack, impersonation attack and desynchronization attack. To solve these type of security and privacy issues, the cryptography need to be applied. But the RFID tags consist of the very
low tag memory and very low processing power. So, it is not easy to design an authentication protocol that uses minimum tag resources and gives sufficient protection. Hence, our aim is to design a efficient authentication protocol which use simple operations like Exclusive-OR etc. which uses less tag resources and gives sufficient protection. In this thesis, the research was mainly focused to design a secure lightweight RFID authentication protocol. We have reviewed some existing proposed RFID authentication protocols to find the weakness and security requirements of our protocol.
The proposed scheme is suitable for low cost RFID tags. This scheme is based on the specification given in EPCglobal Class-1 Generation-2 RFID standard. The proposed scheme is the improvement of the protocol proposed by Cho et al.[1] in 2012. We analysed the Cho et al.[1] protocol and found the attacks in their protocol. Our proposed protocol successfully solved the drawbacks without creating any impact on performance advantage. Besides our scheme achieves both forward and backward untraceability.