SLAP: Succinct and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for low-cost RFID system

Abstract

Data security is crucial for a RFID system. Since the existing RFID mutual authentication protocols encounter the challenges such as security risks, poor performance, an ultra-lightweight authentication protocol named Succinct and Lightweight Authentication Protocol (SLAP) is proposed. SLAP is only composed of bitwise operations like XOR, left rotation and conversion which is easy to implement on a passive tag. The proposed conversion operation as the main security component guarantees the security of RFID system with the properties such as irreversibility, sensibility, full confusion and low complexity, which better performed or even absent in other previous protocols. Security analysis shows that SLAP guarantees the functionalities of mutual authentication as well as resistance to various attacks such as de-synchronization attack, replay attack and traceability attack, etc. Furthermore, performance evaluation also indicates that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing protocols in terms of less computation requirement and fewer communication messages during authentication process.