Scalable Lightweight Authentication Protocol with Privacy Preservation

Abstract

Lots of wireless devices, like mobile phones or RFID tags, could be traced by an adversary. Therefore, privacy-preserving authentication protocols prevail recently. To improve the efficiency, several protocols have been proposed, like tree-based, group-based or key-shared protocols. However, most of these protocols are vulnerable to compromise attacks, resynchronization attacks or traceability. This paper presents a scalable privacy-preserving authentication protocol using hash functions. In the proposed protocol, the authentication server could find out the identifier of a device in constant time irrespective of the total number of devices. In addition, each authentication parameter is changed in every new authentication process to avoid tracing. Also, a challenge-response approach is performed to overcome cloning and replay attacks. Furthermore, the proposed protocol is secure against compromise attacks, resynchronization attacks and other common attacks.