Radio Frequency Identification Authentication Protocol Research Articles

Toward designing a lightweight RFID authentication protocol for constrained environments

AbstractIn present times, Radio‐Frequency Identification (RFID) systems have seen a significant rise in their usage. There has been an increasing interest in developing even lighter RFID protocols suitable for resource‐constrained environments. Ensuring security and privacy remain critical challenges in RFID‐based systems. Recently proposed lightweight authentication schemes, namely LRSAS+ and LRARP+, are ideally suited for constrained devices. However, this article investigates these schemes and reveals certain vulnerabilities: LRSAS+ is susceptible to tag impersonation, desynchronization, and traceability attacks, while LRARP+ can fall prey to traceability and secret disclosure attacks. An enhanced version of these authentication systems is proposed that tackles their inherent weaknesses by leveraging the function. To verify the security of the proposed scheme, a formal analysis is conducted using Gong–Needham–Yahalom logic (GNY logic) and an automated security protocol verification tool, ProVerif. The improved scheme's effectiveness is also compared with multiple contemporary lightweight systems. The results indicate that the enhanced scheme not only meets the security requirements for lightweight authentication schemes but also achieves this with minimal computational overhead.

ENHANCING SECURITY OF RFID-ENABLED IOT SUPPLY CHAIN

In addition to its benefits, the popular Internet of Things (IoT) technology has also opened the way to novel security and privacy issues. The basis of IoT security and privacy starts with trust in the IoT hardware and its supply chain. Counterfeiting, cloning, tampering of hardware, theft, and lost issues in the IoT supply chain have to be addressed, in order to ensure reliable IoT industry growth. In four previous works, radio-frequency identification (RFID)-enabled solutions have been proposed by the same authors, aimed to bring security to the entire IoT supply chain. The works propose a new RFID-traceable hardware architecture, device authentication, and supply chain tracing procedure. In each of these works, a variant of the same is proposed. However, the same variant of lightweight RFID authentication protocol coupled with the offline supply chain proposed in these works has such security vulnerabilities that make the whole supply chain unsafe. In our present work, an online supply chain hop-tracking procedure supported by a novel RFID mutual authentication protocol, based on the strong matching of the RFID readers-their operators-central database present at the transfer hops is proposed. Our proposed Strong RFID Authentication Protocol (STRAP) has been verified by two well-accepted formal protocol analyzers Scyther and AVISPA. The verification results demonstrate that STRAP overcomes the previous works’ vulnerabilities. Furthermore, our proposed novel online supply chain tracing procedure supporting STRAP removes the previous offline supply chain tracing procedure weaknesses.

Survey: An Overview of Lightweight RFID Authentication Protocols Suitable for the Maritime Internet of Things

The maritime sector employs the Internet of Things (IoT) to exploit many of its benefits to maintain a competitive advantage and keep up with the growing demands of the global economy. The maritime IoT (MIoT) not only inherits similar security threats as the general IoT, it also faces cyber threats that do not exist in the traditional IoT due to factors such as the support for long-distance communication and low-bandwidth connectivity. Therefore, the MIoT presents a significant concern for the sustainability and security of the maritime industry, as a successful cyber attack can be detrimental to national security and have a flow-on effect on the global economy. A common component of maritime IoT systems is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. It has been revealed in previous studies that current RFID authentication protocols are insecure against a number of attacks. This paper provides an overview of vulnerabilities relating to maritime RFID systems and systematically reviews lightweight RFID authentication protocols and their impacts if they were to be used in the maritime sector. Specifically, this paper investigates the capabilities of lightweight RFID authentication protocols that could be used in a maritime environment by evaluating those authentication protocols in terms of the encryption system, authentication method, and resistance to various wireless attacks.

Enhancing Security and Privacy in Healthcare Systems Using a Lightweight RFID Protocol

Exploiting Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in healthcare systems has become a common practice, as it ensures better patient care and safety. However, these systems are prone to security vulnerabilities that can jeopardize patient privacy and the secure management of patient credentials. This paper aims to advance state-of-the-art approaches by developing more secure and private RFID-based healthcare systems. More specifically, we propose a lightweight RFID protocol that safeguards patients’ privacy in the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) domain by utilizing pseudonyms instead of real IDs, thereby ensuring secure communication between tags and readers. The proposed protocol has undergone rigorous testing and has been proven to be secure against various security attacks. This article provides a comprehensive overview of how RFID technology is used in healthcare systems and benchmarks the challenges faced by these systems. Then, it reviews the existing RFID authentication protocols proposed for IoT-based healthcare systems in terms of their strengths, challenges, and limitations. To overcome the limitations of existing approaches, we proposed a protocol that addresses the anonymity and traceability issues in existing schemes. Furthermore, we demonstrated that our proposed protocol had a lower computational cost than existing protocols and ensured better security. Finally, our proposed lightweight RFID protocol ensured strong security against known attacks and protected patient privacy using pseudonyms instead of real IDs.

VASERP: An Adaptive, Lightweight, Secure, and Efficient RFID-Based Authentication Scheme for IoV.

With the rapid growth in wireless communication and IoT technologies, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is applied to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to ensure the security of private data and the accuracy of identification and tracking. However, in traffic congestion scenarios, frequent mutual authentication increases the overall computing and communication overhead of the network. For this reason, in this work, we propose a lightweight RFID security fast authentication protocol for traffic congestion scenarios, designing an ownership transfer protocol to transfer access rights to vehicle tags in non-congestion scenarios. The edge server is used for authentication, and the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) algorithm and the hash function are combined to ensure the security of vehicles' private data. The Scyther tool is used for the formal analysis of the proposed scheme, and this analysis shows that the proposed scheme can resist typical attacks in mobile communication of the IoV. Experimental results show that, compared to other RFID authentication protocols, the calculation and communication overheads of the tags proposed in this work are reduced by 66.35% in congested scenarios and 66.67% in non-congested scenarios, while the lowest are reduced by 32.71% and 50%, respectively. The results of this study demonstrate a significant reduction in the computational and communication overhead of tags while ensuring security.

Scalable RFID authentication protocol based on physically unclonable functions

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is commonly used for tracking and identifying objects. However, this technology poses serious security and privacy concerns for individuals carrying the tags. To address these issues, various security protocols have been proposed. Unfortunately, many of these solutions suffer from scalability problems, requiring the back-end server to work linearly in the number of tags for a single tag identification. Some protocols offer O(1) or O(log n) identification complexity but are still susceptible to serious attacks. Few protocols consider attacks on the reader-side. Our proposed RFID authentication protocol eliminates the need for a search in the back-end and leverages Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) to securely store tag secrets, making it resistant to tag corruption attacks. It provides constant-time identification without sacrificing privacy and offers log2n times better identification performance than the state-of-the-art protocol. It ensures destructive privacy for tag holders in the event of reader corruption without any conditions. Furthermore, it enables offline readers to maintain destructive privacy in case of corruption.

Efficient Mobile RFID Authentication Protocol for Smart Logistics Targets Tracking

Target tracking is one of the problems existing in the supply chain management. The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) in target tracking helps improve the monitoring accuracy and status visibility of the tracked target. For mobile RFID system, its three entities have to authenticate each other’s identity in order to guarantee the data transmission security. The mobile RFID authentication protocol cannot achieve both high security and low complexity at the same time. For this problem, a new efficiency mobile RFID authentication protocol is proposed in this paper, which implements secure authentication among different communication entities by different operation modes. For example, the protocol adopts Hash Function between reader and cloud server, and exchange-cross bitwise operation between tag and cloud server, to achieve low computing cost at tag-end while improving the security of mobile communication data. At the cloud server end, the protocol proposed in this paper adopts index data table as the storage mode, which further improves the could server efficiency in retrieving the authentication of tags and readers, and reduces the risks of sensitive data disclosure. According to the security analysis, this protocol can resist impersonation attack, replay attack, trace attack and other attacks launched by attackers. Its security performance is further proved by BAN logic, proverif tool and random oracle model. On the other hand, the simple operation at the tag-end of the protocol lowers the tag cost to a larger extent.

A comprehensive and systematic literature review on the employee attendance management systems based on cloud computing

AbstractAttendance is critical to the success of any business or industry. As a result, most businesses and institutions require a system to track staff attendance. On the other hand, cloud computing technology is being utilized in the human resource management sector. It may be an excellent option for processing and storing large amounts of data and improving management effectiveness to a desirable level. Hence, this paper examines cloud infrastructures for employee attendance management in which the articles are categorized into three groups. The results show that cloud infrastructure has a significant and positive impact on the management of employee attendance systems. Also, the results reveal that the radio frequency identification authentication protocol protects the privacy of tags and readers against database memory. When references operate properly, they help the people concerned and society by making workplaces more efficient and safer.

RUAP: Random rearrangement block matrix-based ultra-lightweight RFID authentication protocol for end-edge-cloud collaborative environment

Cloud computing provides powerful processing capabilities for large-scale intelligent Internet of things (IoT) terminals. However, the massive realtime data processing requirements challenge the existing cloud computing model. The edge server is closer to the data source. The end-edge-cloud collaboration offloads the cloud computing tasks to the edge environment, which solves the shortcomings of the cloud in resource storage, computing performance, and energy consumption. IoT terminals and sensors have caused security and privacy challenges due to resource constraints and exponential growth. As the key technology of IoT, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) authentication protocol tremendously strengthens privacy protection and improves IoT security. However, it inevitably increases system overhead while improving security, which is a major blow to low-cost RFID tags. The existing RFID authentication protocols are difficult to balance overhead and security. This paper designs an ultra-lightweight encryption function and proposes an RFID authentication scheme based on this function for the end-edge-cloud collaborative environment. The BAN logic proof and protocol verification tools AVISPA formally verify the protocol's security. We use VIVADO to implement the encryption function and tag's overhead on the FPGA platform. Performance evaluation indicates that the proposed protocol balances low computing costs and high-security requirements.

Novel lightweight RFID authentication protocols for inexpensive tags

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems represent a support technology employed for the internet of things (IoT). Since RFID systems are now used extensively, it would be a mistake to disregard security problems and user privacy protection. However, constraints on computing power and storage resources in inexpensive tags of RFID have made the execution of security issues difficult. In other words, a persistent formidable challenge to RFID security is to design ultra-lightweight authentication protocols for RFID systems in acceptable compatibility with EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standards. Xiao et al. has recently proposed an appropriate lightweight authentication protocol for inexpensive tags by benefiting from the lightweight block cipher algorithm. They have claimed that their proposed protocol is resistant to all of the known attacks which may occur in RFID systems. In this paper, we show that the LRSAS protocol is vulnerable to replay, reader impersonation, tag tracking, and desynchronization attacks. We demonstrate that the use of fixed messages in the communication between the tag and the reader is led to these attacks. To improve the LRSAS protocol, We propose three lightweight protocols LRSAS+, LRARP, and LRARP+. We analyze the security level of the proposed protocols and prove the security of the proposed design using Gong–Needham–Yahalom logic (GNY logic). We also formally confirmed the security of the proposal using the Scyther simulation tool. According to security analysis, we can observe that these protocols have a high level of security. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed protocols is analyzed. A comparison of the performance of these three protocols with similar protocols shows that these protocols are at a better level than similar protocols in terms of computational costs, storage costs, and communication costs.

Pitfalls in Ultralightweight RFID Authentication Protocol

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is one of the most promising identification schemes in the field of pervasive systems. Non-line of sight capability makes RFID systems more protuberant than its contended systems. Since the RFID systems incorporate wireless medium, so there are some allied security threats and apprehensions from malicious adversaries. In order to make the system reliable and secure, numerous researchers have proposed ultralightweight mutual authentication protocols; which involve only simple bitwise logical operations (AND, XOR & OR etc.) to provide security. In this paper, we have analyzed the security vulnerabilities of state of the art ultralightweight RFID authentication protocol: RAPP. We have proposed three attacks (two DoS and one Desynchronization) in RAPP protocol and challenged its security claims. Moreover, we have also highlighted some common pitfalls in ultralightweight authentication protocol designs. This will help as a sanity check, improve and longevity of ultralightweight authentication protocol designs.

SE-H: A Secure and Efficient Hash Protocol for RFID System

The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems are suffered from the growing of security vulnerabilities. In the RFID Applications, an attackers may exploit these vulnerabilities to break the tag holder privacy and desynchronize the communication messages between system components. The majority of the proposed solutions fail to solve the existing vulnerabilities. Therefore, the authentication protocol is the main challenge in such systems. This paper proposes a secure and efficient hash authentication (SE-H) protocol for RFID system to support attractive security features. Compared with the recent RFID authentication protocols, the SE-H protocol cannot only perform strong security features including mutual authentication and the data secrecy features, but also perform the user anonymity and untraceability features with low cost performance. The security analysis proves that the SE-H protocol is resistant to the current vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the performance analysis in term of the authentication operations cost illustrates that SE-H protocol is more efficient than the recent RFID protocols.

Renovated XTEA Encoder Architecture-Based Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol for RFID and Green Wireless Sensor Network Applications

Wireless sensor networks find applications everywhere in day to day activities right from attendance entry systems to healthcare monitoring systems. The evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) as the Internet of Everything (IoET) makes the wireless sensor network omnipresent and increases the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for the proper identification of devices and sensor nodes which are mostly battery operated. As technology evolves, security threats also increase rapidly. This mandates a strong and energy-efficient green solution. This work attempted to address these issues by effectively deploying the lightweight encryption scheme called Extended Tiny Encryption Algorithm (XTEA). Though the XTEA is lightweight and famous, it is commonly known for various attacks. Our work patches the security threats in the XTEA by applying domain-specific customization, random number utilization, and undisclosed key renewal techniques. Two custom Renovated XTEA Mutual Authentication Protocol (RXMAP) encoder architectures, namely, RXMAP-1 and RXMAP-2, are proposed based on the replacement of accurate computational blocks with approximate blocks. The proposed RXMAP protocol is evaluated for its computational and storage overhead and verified against various security threats using BAN logic formal verification and informal verification. The proposed encoder architectures are simulated for functional verification, and ASIC implementation is done with a 132 nm process node. ASIC implementation results show that the proposed designs RXMAP-1 and RXMAP-2 occupy 53.11% and 53.31% lesser area compared to XTEA I and 52.97% and 53.18% lesser area compared to XTEA II implementation. The total power consumed by the proposed encoder architectures RXMAP-1 and RXMAP-2 is 68.76% and 71.64% lesser than XTEA II implementation, respectively, while maintaining the equal throughput.

An Improved Security Authentication Protocol for Lightweight RFID Based on ECC

The security, privacy, and operation efficiency of radio frequency identification (RFID) must be fully measured in practical use. A few RFID authentication schemes based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) have been proposed, but most of them cannot resist the existing attacks. The scheme presented by Qian et al. could not resist impersonation attack according to our security analysis. Then, we propose a novel lightweight RFID authentication scheme, which is proved that it can resist server spoofing attack, tag masquerade attack, and provide other security properties of a RFID authentication scheme. Comparisons of computation and communication cost demonstrate that the proposed scheme is more suitable for the resource-constrained RFID authentication.

A Secure and reliable RFID authentication protocol using digital schnorr cryptosystem for IoT-enabled healthcare in COVID-19 scenario.

The Internet of Things (IoT) plays an important role in various healthcare applications. Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is widely used as a leading identification technology in a variety of IoT-health applications. In 2020, the number of cases of novel Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) was increased rapidly throughout the world. Herein, IoT-Health enables the more convenient ways to access remotely and efficiently the medical services for the patients, also provides health monitoring by the doctors, physicians, and nurses over the Internet. However, security and privacy are considered key concerns in RFID-based IoT-health systems due to wireless communication over the channel. There could be huge risks of leakage of the patient’s sensitive information, medical data, privacy of the patients, and so forth. To overcome these shortcomings, we have put forward a secure and reliable RFID authentication protocol using Digital Schnorr Cryptosystem for IoT-Health in COVID-19 patients care named SAP-DSC. Compared with the similar existing protocols, the security analysis followed by the performance evaluation of our proposed protocol demonstrates the minimal computation overheads and also provides resistance to various well-known security attacks. The AVISPA and Scyther simulation results confirm that the proposed protocol is safe under active and passive attacks. The overall analysis shows that the SAP-DSC is relatively superior to the other similar existing protocols.

Survey: Vulnerability Analysis of Low-Cost ECC-Based RFID Protocols against Wireless and Side-Channel Attacks.

The radio frequency identification (RFID) system is one of the most important technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) that tracks single or multiple objects. This technology is extensively used and attracts the attention of many researchers in various fields, including healthcare, supply chains, logistics, asset tracking, and so on. To reach the required security and confidentiality requirements for data transfer, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is a powerful solution, which ensures a tag/reader mutual authentication and guarantees data integrity. In this paper, we first review the most relevant ECC-based RFID authentication protocols, focusing on their security analysis and operational performances. We compare the various lightweight ECC primitive implementations designed for RFID applications in terms of occupied area and power consumption. Then, we highlight the security threats that can be encountered considering both network attacks and side-channel attacks and analyze the security effectiveness of RFID authentication protocols against such types of attacks. For this purpose, we classify the different threats that can target an ECC-based RFID system. After that, we present the most promising ECC-based protocols released during 2014–2021 by underlining their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we perform a comparative study between the different protocols mentioned regarding network and side-channel attacks, as well as their implementation costs to find the optimal one to use in future works.

MUMAP: Modified Ultralightweight Mutual Authentication protocol for RFID enabled IoT networks

Flawed authentication protocols led to the need for a secured protocol for radio frequency identification (RFID) techniques. In this paper, an authentication protocol named Modified ultralightweight mutual authentication protocol (MUMAP) has been proposed and cryptanalysed by Juel-Weis challenge. The proposed protocol aimed to reduce memory requirements in the authentication process for low-cost RFID tags with limited resources. Lightweight operations like XOR and Left Rotation, are used to circumvent the flaws made in the other protocols. The proposed protocol has three-phase of authentication. Security analysis of the proposed protocol proves its resistivity against attacks like desynchronization, disclosure, tracking, and replay attack. On the other hand, performance analysis indicates that it is an effective protocol to use in low-cost RFID tags. Juel-Weis challenge verifies the proposed protocol where it shows insusceptibility against modular operations.

Low-Cost RFID Authentication Protocol Based on Elliptic Curve Algorithm

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is the fastest growing technology in the world today. Thus, wireless communication between tags and readers became an integral part of retail products, library books, personal identifications, and healthcare. The RFID system can provide security features to the data transferred along the network to maintain data privacy, integrity, and confidentiality. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is widely used in RFID authentication protocols to improve communication security. Zhao proposed an RFID authentication protocol using ECC where a unique access list for tags is generated with the reader identifier to elevate the security level. Although Zhao's protocol can withstand most of the RFID security attacks, it has a very high computation cost. The authors improve Zhao protocol and propose a new RFID authentication protocol by reducing the computation cost almost to the half of that in Zhao. The proposed protocol shows a significant improvement in the computation cost.

A provably secure RFID authentication protocol based on ECQV for the medical internet of things

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an emerging technology that is used for the unique identification of objects. RFID can be used in different application domains, including Health-care systems, where the safety of patient-sensitive data is a primary concern. Since the RFID technology is used in various medicine sectors, particularly real-time patient monitoring, patient medicine Information, medical emergency, and drug administration system, the use of RFID raises severe security and privacy concerns. In order to cope with these security issues, we propose an Elliptic curve based authentication protocol for RFID. The proposed model uses an implicit certificate concept to secure health-care data. We prove this claim for secure communication using the formal security analysis, i.e., BAN logic, security analysis based on the mathematical model, i.e., ROR model, formal verification using AVISPA tool, and informal security analysis. We review some of the RFID authentication schemes based on ECC in terms of performance and security. Our analysis indicates that the proposed protocol provides mobility, scalability, security, and privacy in the health care environment.

An enhanced scalable and secure RFID authentication protocol for WBAN within an IoT environment

Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT)-based E-healthcare represents an emergent research field due to the fast development of wireless technologies and cloud computing. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an integral technology in IoT thanks to its low cost and autonomous data collection and transfer. These features made it useful in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) for healthcare applications. However, data security and patient privacy remain major challenges in WBANs. In this context, many authentication protocols have been designed trying to satisfy both security and implementation requirements. Most recently, Naeem et al. have proposed an RFID authentication scheme for IoT which is claimed to be secure and provides scalability. Unfortunately, we have found that their protocol does not provide authentication and anonymity and it is vulnerable to numerous attacks. To overcome these security issues, we propose, in this paper, an efficient extended and improved IoT-based RFID authentication scheme for WBANs. Our proposed protocol could resist to various attacks and ensure mutual authentication from the tag to the medical server, in addition to patients data security. For this, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) encryption mechanism and elliptic curve digital signature with message recovery (ECDSMR) have been adopted. Formal and informal analysis have proved that our proposed protocol succeeded to provide many security features and offer reliable data security with a considerably small computational and storage cost compared to existing schemes.