An Effencient Improvement of RFID Authentication Protocol Using Hash Function ZKP

Abstract

The applications of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been rapidly developed to be used in different fields that require automatic identification of objects and managing information. The advantage of employing RFID systems is to facilitate automatic identification of objects from distance without any interaction with tagged objects and without using a line of sight as compared with barcode. However, security and privacy constitute a challenge to RFID system as RFID systems use the wireless communication. Many researchers have introduced elliptical curve cryptographic (ECC) solutions to the security and privacy in RFID system as an ideal cryptosystem to be implemented with RFID technology. However, most of these solutions do not have provide adequate protection. Moreover, in terms of integrity and confidentiality level, most of these authentication protocols still vulnerable to some of security and privacy attacks. Based on these facts, this paper proposes a mutual authentication protocol that aims at enhancing an existing RFID authentication protocol that suffers from tracking attack and man-in-the-middle attack (MITM). The enhancement is accomplished by improving the security and privacy level against MITM, tracking attack and other related attacks. The proposed protocol is dependent on use the elliptical curve version of Schnorr identification protocol in combination with Keccak hash function. This combination leads to enhance the confidentiality and integrity level of the RFID authentication system and increase the privacy protection.