An ultralightweight and privacy-preserving authentication protocol for mobile RFID systems

Abstract

Existing work on RFID authentication problems always make assumptions that 1) hash function can be fully used in designing RFID protocols; 2) channels between readers and the server are always secure. However, the first assumption is not suitable for EPC Class-1 Gen-2 tags, which has been challenged in many research work, while the second one cannot be adopted in mobile RFID applications where the wireless channels between readers and the server are always insecure. In this paper, we propose a new ultralightweight authentication protocol for mobile RFID systems. We only use bitwise XOR, and special constructed pseudo-random number generators (RNGs) to achieve our aims in insecure mobile RFID environment. Security analysis shows that our protocol can provide several privacy properties and avoid suffering from kinds of attacks, including tag anonymity, tag location privacy, reader privacy, forward secrecy, and mutual authentication, replay attack, desynchronization attack etc. We implement our protocol and compare authentication delays with several existing work, the results indicate us that our protocol significantly improves the efficiency.