Across-authority lightweight ownership transfer protocol

Abstract

With the combination of mobile devices and readers in recent years, mobile RFID systems have been widely deployed in mobile identification and its further applications. E-commerce has applied many mobile RFID services, including the transfer of a tagged item’s ownership. To secure such transfer in a mobile RFID environment, we propose a new ownership transfer protocol across different authorities. We prove that it is able to withstand most threats for RFID and prevent denial of service attacks that arise in the presence of asynchrony. It can also guarantee forward and backward secrecy, and circumvent the windowing problem. This scheme is designed for lightweight tags and has been proved to be viable for use in low-cost passive tags. It also offers better performance than any other known ownership transfer schemes.