Three elliptic curve cryptography-based RFID authentication protocols for Internet of Things

Abstract

With the development of information technology, the Internet of Thing (IoT) is extensively employed in many fields such as logistics, medical healthcare, food safety and intelligent transportation. The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is an important building block of the IoT. Therefore, how to address security problem in RFID system is a crucial issue for the security of the IoT. The RFID authentication protocol is a key cryptographic protocol ensuring communication security because it could provide authentication between the tag and the server. Recently, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-based RFID authentication protocols were studied widely because they could provide better security attributes compared with traditional RFID authentications. Lv et al. proposed three ECC-based RFID protocols and claimed their protocols could overcome weaknesses in previous protocols. Unfortunately, in this paper, we show that Lv et al.’s protocols cannot withstand the man-in-the-middle attack. To solve security problems in their protocols, we propose three improved ECC-based RFID authentication protocols.