Mutual Authentication Protocol for Enhanced RFID Security and Anti-counterfeiting

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology that has been widely used in daily life, such as in access control, in electronic passports, public transportation, payment and ticketing. The reader communicates with the RFID tags using a wireless channel where the security and privacy requirements are satisfied via cryptographic building blocks (e. g, hash functions, symmetric encryptions and secure authentication protocol). However, since the RFID information may be easily unveiled over the air, security and the privacy issues always exist. In this paper, we propose a new mutual authentication protocol in RFID systems. This protocol uses an ID tag which is encrypted with a hash function and a stream cipher based OTP by challenge-response pair of a PUF (Physically Unclonable Function), thus there is no key disclosure problem in our protocol. NLM-128 stream cipher is used to generate the OTP value, it provides low-resource hardware implementation, which is appropriate for ubiquitous computing devices such as a sensor in USN or a RFID tag. It takes a 128-bit key and a 128-bit initialization vector, has 258-bits of internal stage, and achieves a security level of 2128.