A Secure RFID Identity Reporting Protocol for Physical Attack Resistance

Abstract

RFID tags will exist pervasively in our daily life in a near future. In RFID systems, privacy and security are of critical importance to avoid potential tracking abuse and privacy violations. Many protocols have been proposed to address privacy and security issues in RFID systems. Physical attacks receive few considerations from the current research. Through physically attacks, attackers can get the secret identification-related information stored on RFID tags, and can later use the obtained information to impersonate legitimate readers for illegal tracking. In this paper we describe a threat model of RFID systems and present a detailed analysis of physical attacks on RFID tags and other security threats. We propose a secure identity reporting protocol to address these threats. Our security and performance analysis show that the proposed protocol can defeat physical attacks, in addition to other security threats, and scale well to large RFID systems.