Defense against impersonating attackers: An efficient RFID mutual authentication protocol based on standard

Abstract

As the RFID based Internet of Things (loT) gets worldwide attention, to prepare for the rapidly increasing applications in daily life, various security protocols are proposed. But, these protocols, most of which are limited by the tag processing capacity and dangerous exposure during transmission, could only be applied in certain fields. Previously, Chen and Deng's mutual authentication and privacy protection protocol which conforming EPC Class 1 Generation 2 Standards stands out for low cost as well as little requirements of the tag processing capacity. However, currently reported by others, this system faces up with severe dangers of tracking or cloning tags via impersonating attacks. After scrutiny, we found out that these vulnerabilities lie in the insufficient protections of random numbers, and we reconstruct the request and response based on the original protocol by making message unrepeatable, key elements secret and adding small storage for comparisons. The security of our protocol, proved by Ban logic analysis, is ensured by double protections — secret key pairs and dynamic random numbers. Our comparisons show that our protocol not only is safe under traditional attacks guaranteed by the original protocol but also overcomes impersonating attacks which represents the inherent weakness of information exposure in public.