ULMAP: Ultralightweight NFC Mutual Authentication Protocol with Pseudonyms in the Tag for IoT in 5G

Abstract

As one of the core techniques in 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly attracting people’s attention. Meanwhile, as an important part of IoT, the Near Field Communication (NFC) is widely used on mobile devices and makes it possible to take advantage of NFC system to complete mobile payment and merchandise information reading. But with the development of NFC, its problems are increasingly exposed, especially the security and privacy of authentication. Many NFC authentication protocols have been proposed for that, some of them only improve the function and performance without considering the security and privacy, and most of the protocols are heavyweight. In order to overcome these problems, this paper proposes an ultralightweight mutual authentication protocol, named ULMAP. ULMAP only uses Bit and XOR operations to complete the mutual authentication and prevent the denial of service (DoS) attack. In addition, it uses subkey and subindex number into its key update process to achieve the forward security. The most important thing is that the computation and storage overhead of ULMAP are few. Compared with some traditional schemes, our scheme is lightweight, economical, practical, and easy to protect against synchronization attack.