Towards Scalable Identification in RFID Systems

Abstract

The search efficiency of radio frequency identification (RFID) protocols remains a challenging issue. There are many proposals that address the security and privacy issues of RFID, but most of them require reader work that is linear with the number of tags. Some proposals use a tree-based approach to solve the search efficiency problem. The tree-based approach reduces the search complexity from $${\mathcal {O}}(N)$$O(N) to $${\mathcal {O}}(\log N)$$O(logN). However, tree-based protocols are vulnerable to tag compromising attacks due to the lack of a key-updating mechanism. Therefore, tree-based protocols are weak private in Vaudenay's privacy model. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving RFID authentication protocol that does not require lookup. Our solution is based on the use of physically unclonable functions (PUFs) and is destructive-private in the Vaudenay-Model. It provides resistance against tag compromising attack by using PUFs as a secure storage mechanism to preserve the privacy of the tag.