A lightweight RFID authentication protocol with confidentiality and anonymity

Abstract

Radio Frequency IDentification(RFID) is one of the most important sensing techniques for Internet of Things(IoT) and RFID systems have been applied to various different fields. But an RFID system usually uses open wireless radio wave to communicate and this will lead to a serious threat to its privacy and security. The current popular RFID tags are some low-cost passive tags. Their computation and storage resources are very limited. It is not feasible for them to complete some complicated cryptographic operations. So it is very difficult to protect the security and privacy of an RFID system. Lightweight authentication protocol is considered as an effective approach. Many typical authentication protocols usually use Hash functions so that they require more computation and storage resources. Based on CRC function, we propose a lightweight RFID authentication protocol, which needs less computation and storage resources than Hash functions. This protocol exploits an on-chip CRC function and a pseudorandom number generator to ensure the anonymity and freshness of communications between reader and tag. It provides forward security and confidential communication. It can prevent eavesdropping, location trace, replay attack, spoofing and DOS-attack effectively. It is very suitable to be applied to RFID systems.