EPC Class-1 Generation-2 Standard Research Articles

Tracking and impersonating tags in a CRC-based ultralightweight RFID authentication protocol

Design of ultralightweight authentication protocols for RFID systems conformed with the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard is still a challenging issue in RFID security. Recently, Maurya et al. proposed a CRC-based authentication protocol and claimed that their protocol resists against all attacks known in RFID systems. However, in this paper, we criticize employment of CRC function as a security primitive for authentication protocols by proposing two serious attacks against Maurya et al.’s protocol. These two effective and low-complexity attacks include a tag impersonation attack and a tag traceability attack. Our attacks use the linearity of the CRC function employed in this protocol. Our analyses show that the success probability of our attacks is “1” while the complexity is only one session eavesdropping, two XORs and one CRC computation. Moreover, we verify correctness of our attacks by simulating them.

Efficient Distributed Identification for RFID Systems

RFID systems have been adopted by several sectors in societies for a wide set of applications, ranging from item level tagging to supply chain management. One of the most important RFID applications is tag identification, which is a process executed in an RFID network in order to distinguish the corresponding associated objects. Most of the research in this direction is aimed to the design of efficient communication protocols, which identify the whole set of tags in the covering region of an RFID reader. The common scenario comprises one reader and a set of tags, where the reader is generally located at the center of the interrogation zone; this scenario has been studied in several different ways with a centralized paradigm. However, there is a recent interest on analyzing an alternative scheme that consists in splitting the interrogation zone and executing a distributed mechanism to identify the whole set of tags. To date, some of the few contributions considering distributed approaches do not take into account a practical communication model. Thus, in this work we evaluate and compare the performance of both RFID tag identification paradigms using the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard and propose a practical communication model for such proposals distributing the identification process. Our results show that, indeed, the performance of the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard may be highly improved with the adoption of a distributed mechanism if all its features are fully exploited. Hence, the improvements obtained with our distributed proposal reach a gain of up to 65 % on the total identification delay compared with its centralized counterpart.

Attacks on ownership transfer scheme for multi-tag multi-owner passive RFID environments

Sundaresan et al. proposed recently a novel ownership transfer protocol for multi-tag multi-owner RFID environments that complies with the EPC Class1 Generation2 standard. The authors claim that this provides individual-owner privacy and prevents tracking attacks. We show that this protocol falls short of its security objectives, and describe attacks that allow: (a) an eavesdropper to trace a tag, (b) the previous owner to obtain the private information that the tag shares with the new owner, and (c) an adversary that has access to the data stored on a tag to link this tag to previous interrogations (violating forward-secrecy). We analyze the security proof and show that while the first two cases can be addressed with a more careful design, strong privacy remains an open problem for lightweight RFID applications.

Cryptanalaysis of an EPCC1G2 Standard Compliant Ownership Transfer Scheme

Recently, Chen and Chien have proposed a novel ownership transfer scheme with low implementation costs and conforming to the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard. The authors claimed that the proposed scheme is able to resist all attacks, and hence it has better security and performance than its predecessors. However, in this paper we show that the protocol fails short of its security objectives, and it is even less secure than the previously proposed schemes. In fact, we describe several attacks which allow to recover all the secret information stored in the tag. Obviously, once this information is known, tags can be easily traced and impersonated.

A Secure Authentication Protocol Conforming to EPC Class-1 Generation-2 Standard

With the development of e-business market, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is becoming more and more importance. It is often used to identify object because it can work without manual intervention. Several organizations including EPC global and ISO have been working on the standard of RFID all the time in order to promote it using low-cost tags. In particular, the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard was accepted as an international standard by ISO/IEC. However, this standard exists some security vulnerabilities. To resolve these vulnerabilities, some protocols conforming to EPC Class 1 Generation 2 was proposed. In this paper, we show the weaknesses which exist in RFID system’s security protocols conforming to EPC Class-1 Generation-2 and submit a new security protocol suitable to the standard, then validate the whole security performance of the new protocol. The safety performance of the new protocol and existing protocols are also compared in this paper .The result shows that the the new protocol could be used in the low-cost tag because of its high security and low communication complexity.

A Low-Power Continuously-Calibrated Clock Recovery Circuit for UHF RFID EPC Class-1 Generation-2 Transponders

A low-power, reliable and re-configurable clock recovery circuit for UHF RFID transponders for the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard is proposed. Based on a digital frequency-locked loop, the clock recovery circuit uses timing information available in the downlink data, namely, the pulse intervals of the PIE-coded data, to calibrate an oscillator's output frequency to meet the stringent frequency accuracy requirement of the standard. Fabricated in a 0.18-?m standard CMOS technology, the clock recovery circuit provides a calibrated frequency of 2.56 MHz with a frequency deviation within the range from -3.2% to +1.2% over process, supply voltage and temperature variations. The chip has an active area of 0.22 ?m2, operates from a supply voltage from 0.75 V to 1.3 V, and consumes less than 2 ?W for a 1-V supply.

Practical attacks on a mutual authentication scheme under the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard

The EPC Class-1 Generation-2 RFID standard provides little security, as has been shown in previous works such as [S. Karthikeyan, M. Nesterenko, RFID security without extensive cryptography, in: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Security of Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, 2005, pp. 63–67; D.N. Duc, J. Park, H. Lee, K. Kim, Enhancing security of EPCglobal Gen-2 RFID tag against traceability and cloning, in: The 2006 Symposium on Cryptography and Information Security, 2006; H.Y. Chien, C.H. Chen, Mutual authentication protocol for RFID conforming to EPC Class 1 Generation 2 standards, Computer Standards & Interfaces 29 (2007) 254–259; P. Peris-Lopez, J.C. Hernandez-Castro, J.M. Estevez-Tapiador, A. Ribagorda, Cryptanalysis of a novel authentication protocol conforming to EPC-C1G2 standard, in: Proceedings of Int’l Conference on RFID Security (RFIDSec)’07, Jul 2007; T.L. Lim, T. Li, Addressing the weakness in a lightweight RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme, in Proceedings of the IEEE Int’l Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM) 2007, Nov 2007, pp. 59–63]. In particular, the security of an RFID tag’s access and kill passwords is almost non-existent. Konidala and Kim recently proposed a new mutual authentication scheme [D.M. Konidala, Z. Kim, K. Kim, A simple and cost-effective RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme, in: Proceedings of Int’l Conference on RFID Security (RFIDSec)’07, Jul 2007, pp. 141–152] – an improved version of their first attempt [D.M. Konidala, K. Kim, RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme utilizing tag’s access password, Auto-ID Labs White Paper WP-HARDWARE-033, Jan 2007] – in which a tag’s access and kill passwords are used for authentication. In this paper, we show that the new scheme continues to present serious security flaws. The 16 least significant bits of the access password can be obtained with probability 2 - 2 , and the 16 most significant bits with a probability greater than 2 - 5 . Finally, we show how an attacker can recover the entire kill password with probability 2 - 2 .

Cryptanalysis of a novel authentication protocol conforming to EPC-C1G2 standard

In 2006, the standard EPC Class-1 Generation-2 (EPC-C1G2) was ratified both by EPCglobal and ISO. This standard can be considered as a “universal” specification for low-cost RFID tags. Although it represents a great advance for the consolidation of RFID technology, it does not pay due attention to security and, as expected, its security level is very low. In 2007, Chien et al. published a mutual authentication protocol conforming to EPC-C1G2 which tried to correct all its security shortcomings. In this article, we point out various major security flaws in Chien et al.'s proposal. We show that none of the authentication protocol objectives are met. Unequivocal identification of tagged items is not guaranteed because of possible birthday attacks. Furthermore, an attacker can impersonate not only legitimate tags, but also the back-end database. The protocol does not provide forward security either. Location privacy is easily jeopardized by a straightforward tracking attack. Finally, we show how a successful auto-desynchronization (DoS attack) can be accomplished in the back-end database despite the security measures taken against it.