An Efficient Lightweight RFID Authentication Protocol with Strong Trajectory Privacy Protection

Abstract

Low-cost tags are widely used, but have very limited storage space and computing power. In this paper, we propose an efficent lightweight radio-frequency identification (RFID) authentication protocol with strong trajectory privacy protection to balance the security and availability of RFID systems. In this protocol, tags only adopt pseudo-random number generator and XOR operation. In the authentication process, tags always use pseudonyms to prevent the exposure of sensitive messages, the pseudonyms and secret numbers of the tags are synchronized with the background server all the time. The analysis shows that the protocol can solve security issues such as desynchronization attack, man in the middle attack, forward security, replay attack, clone and so on effectively, and meet the requirements of low-cost tags. The trajectory privacy model of RFID systems is also used to prove the strong trajectory privacy and security of the protocol. This protocol has a better performance in terms of storage cost, computation cost and communication cost, and the search efficiency of the background server comparing to the existing relevant research results.