PUF Protected Variables: A Solution to RFID Security and Privacy Under Corruption With Temporary State Disclosure

Abstract

RFID tag corruption is a powerful attack on RFID systems, especially when it reveals the tag's temporary state. Under such an attack, no RFID scheme can achieve both security and privacy if the tags are not endowed with some hardware primitives, such as physically unclonable functions (PUFs), to prevent adversarial access to secret information. However, the use of such primitives does not constitute a guarantee for security and privacy because they do not substitute a good RFID system design. In this paper a general technique is proposed, to translate any (PUF-based) RFID scheme that is secure and private under corruption without temporary state disclosure into a PUF-based RFID scheme that is secure and private under corruption with temporary state disclosure. Our technique is optimal with respect to the tag overhead induced by PUFs. The technique is richly exemplified on both RFID and PUF-based RFID schemes. As a notable result, the first PUF-based RFID scheme is obtained, that is secure and forward private, but not destructive private, under corruption with temporary state disclosure. By using our technique, some flawed PUF-based RFID schemes that have been proposed so far in the literature can be fixed.