A Quorum RFID System Using Threshold Cryptosystem

Abstract

The applications of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology have been expanded to be used in different fields that need automatic defining objects without human intervention. Recently, RFID applications have been increasingly used in the world due to its significant advantage in providing accurate information, ease of control, and reduce labour cost. Even though, researchers have reported issues with the RFID technology in terms of security and privacy which makes the RFID technology vulnerable to many threats. To satisfy such threats, many RFID based authentication schemes have been proposed. Secret sharing schemes have been also proposed for RFID system due to key management ability. Elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) has attracted researchers to apply within RFID system due to security and stability properties. This paper attempts to develop an RFID scheme that allows multi RFID tags to be authenticated within an RFID reader by using ElGamal cryptosystem or the lite version of the Cramer-Shoup cryptosystem and elliptical curve cryptography. With the threshold of the ElGamal or the lite version of Cramer-Shoup, the tag's secret information is split by using Shamir secret sharing scheme among n tags with n secrets shares such that any k quorum tags can reconstruct and decrypt the secret information. As the Shamir secret shares are to be stored on RFID tags with limited memory, the elliptic curve version of Cramer-Shoup will be used in the implementation. The security of the scheme is based on the security achievement of the Shamir secret sharing schem, ElGamal cryptosystem and the lite version of Cramer-Shoup cryptosystem.