A Private and Scalable Authentication for RFID Systems Using Reasonable Storage

Abstract

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In recent years, numerous authentication protocols for radio frequency identification (RFID) systems have been proposed to protect privacy. Due to the hardware resource limitation on RFID tags, the majority of these protocols are based on symmetric-key ciphers. However, most of them lack scalability at the reader side as they require a linear or logarithmic search proportional to the number of tags in the system in order to authenticate a tag. Recently proposed scalable protocols require a constant-time search and utilize hash look-up tables. However, the storage requirement of the hash-table in these protocols is very large, therefore not practical. Moreover, previous proposals do not support dynamic resizing where the number of tags changes during the life time of the RFID system. In this paper, a new Re-Hash technique is presented to reduce the hash-table storage in constant-time authentication protocols. To the best of our knowledge, it offers the smallest storage cost in comparison to previous proposals. The Re-Hash technique is also further adapted to support the dynamic scalability for RFID systems.