Lightweight and privacy-preserving RFID authentication scheme for distributed IoT infrastructure with secure localization services for smart city environment

Abstract

With the rapid development of device-to-device and machine-to-machine communication, there is an exponential increase in the usage of various smart applications, such as intelligent transportation systems, smart e-healthcare, and smart education. In these applications, various devices can be identified using RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) tags, which can be used for transferring the collected data to other local or remote objects at various geographical locations. However, for automatic reading of data accumulated in an RFID-tag embedded in an object/device, authentication is required at various stages for the aforementioned applications. In RFID-based systems for smart applications, an RFID-tag may be operated from several meters distance and it does not require to be put within direct line-of-sight of the reader like a barcode system. Therefore, the traditional barcode system will be replaced by the RFID authentication system in near future since in the later, technology reading of a large amount of data within short span is possible. However, in existing RFID-based authentication systems, an adversary may access the RFID-tag information, which can compromise the privacy and it may also create forgery problems. In addition, RFID-based authentication is suffering from heavy computation burden since an RFID-tag has very limited computation capability. To address these issues, lots of anonymous RFID-based authentication schemes have been designed using lightweight cryptographic tools, e.g., the hash function and symmetric key encryption. However, all these schemes failed to achieve known security and functionality requirements. Motivated by the above-mentioned issues, in this paper, we have put forwarded an RFID-based authentication architecture for distributed IoT (Internet of Things) applications suitable for the future smart city environments. Subsequently, we have put forwarded a lightweight RFID-based authentication scheme to provide reasonable execution time compared to existing schemes. Our scheme provides forward secrecy, anonymity and untraceability of RFID-tag, and secure localization. In summary, the proposed scheme can be used in wide range of applications in smart city environments.