OTP-IoT: An ownership transfer protocol for the Internet of Things

Abstract

An RFID ownership transfer protocol enables a tag owner to transfer the ownership of the tag to a new owner. While there have been a large number of such protocols in the literature, designing secure and efficient protocols remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a scalable and secure RFID ownership transfer protocol that can be deployed in resource-constrained EPC class tags in a large RFID inventory system. The contribution of this paper include: employing a Semi-Trusted Party (STP) to leverage the essence of typical complex ownership transfer process for the end users, introducing a new variant of mutual authentication scheme from Learning Parity from Noise (LPN) problem to the typical ownership transfer protocol, allowing multiple tags from an owner to be transferred to the new owner by combining homomorphic aggregated signature (HomSig) and pseudo-inverse matrix properties. We demonstrate that the scheme is secure under the standard model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first provably secure LPN-based ownership transfer protocol that allows relatively small gate-count and code size suitable for the low-cost and resource-constrained IoT devices.