KEDGEN2: A key establishment and derivation protocol for EPC Gen2 RFID systems

Abstract

The EPC Class-1 Generation-2 (Gen2 for short) is a Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology that is gaining a prominent place in several domains. However, the Gen2 standard lacks of verifiable security functionalities. Eavesdropping attacks can, for instance, affect the security of applications based on the Gen2 technology. To address this problem, RFID tags must be equipped with a robust mechanism to authenticate readers before authorising them to access their data. In this paper, we propose a key establishment and derivation protocol which is applied at both identification phase and those remainder operations requiring security. Our solution is based on a pseudorandom number generator that uses a low computational workload, while ensuring long term secure communication to protect the secrecy of the exchanged data. Mutual authentication of the tag and the sensor and strong notions of secrecy such as forward and backward secrecy are analysed, and we prove formally that after being amended, our protocol is secure with respect to these properties.