A Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Low-Cost RFID

Abstract

As low-cost RFIDs with limited resources will dominate most of the RFID market, it is imperative to design lightweight RFID authentication protocols for these low-cost RFIDs. However, most of existing RFID authentication protocols either suffer from some security weaknesses or require costly operations that are not available on low-cost tags. In this paper, we analyze the security vulnerabilities of a lightweight authentication protocol recently proposed by Li et al. (2006), and then propose a new lightweight protocol to improve the security and to reduce the computational cost for identifying a tag from O(n) to O(1).