An efficient and secure RFID authentication protocol using elliptic curve cryptography

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.

In recent years, radio frequency identification (RFID) systems have become popular for identification. The key technology to protect the security of RFID systems is mutual authentication between the tags and the server. To enhance the efficiency of RFID systems, recently, Liu et al. proposed a group authentication protocol based on the concept of secret sharing. In this paper, we show that Liu et al.’s protocol falls short of providing security requirements. More specifically, we prove that in their protocol, authenticity of the tags to the server can not be achieved and on top of that the scheme can not be used more than once. We further propose a group mutual authentication protocol for RFID tags to overcome the mentioned drawbacks and prove that our proposal is secure. The results of analyzing the performance of the proposed protocol and its comparison with existing literature indicate that it outperforms current secure RFID authentication protocols.

SummaryIn the fifth generation mobile networks (in short, 5G), radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are embedded in a growing number of personal items, especially in smartphones. The RFID authentication protocols in 5G should be anti‐scanning and privacy‐enhancing, because RFID tags in smartphones often suffer from leaking private trace of mobile users. However, majorities of existing RFID protocols are vulnerable to location‐tracking threats, and to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on back‐end servers. To eliminate these threats, we propose a hash‐based mutual authentication protocol for smartphones in 5G. This protocol protects individuals' location privacy against malicious hidden scanning in public places. By the authentication of RFID readers via hash values, the proposed protocol is robust against the aforementioned threats. Additionally, our authentication efficiency on the tag side is 2H (two hash calculations), which outperforms most of previously reported solutions based on hash, and the tag stores only two vectors (one is k‐bit and the other j‐bit). Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems represent a key technology for ubiquitous computing and for the deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT). In RFID technology, authentication protocols are often necessary in order to confirm the identity of the parties involved (i.e. RFID readers, RFID tags and/or database servers). In this article, we analyze the security of a mutual authentication protocol proposed by Wang and Ma. Our security analysis clearly shows major security pitfalls in this protocol. Firstly, we show two approaches that an adversary may use to mislead an honest reader into thinking that it is communicating with a legitimate database. Secondly, we show how an adversary that has compromised some tags can impersonate an RFID reader to a legitimate database. Furthermore, we present a new adversary model, which pays heed on cases missed by previous proposals. In contrast to previous models where the communication between an RFID reader and a back-end server is through a secure channel, our model facilitates the security analysis of more general schemes where this communication channel (RFID reader-to-server) is insecure. This model determines whether the compromise of RFID tags has any impact on the security of the reader-to-server communication or vice versa. In a secure protocol, the possible compromise of RFID tags should not affect the RFID reader-server communication. In this paper, we show that compromising of RFID tags in Wang and Ma protocol has a direct impact on the reader-server security. Finally, we propose a new authentication protocol that offers an adequate security level and is resistant against the mentioned security risks. The security proofs of the proposed protocol are supported with Gong-Needham-Yahalom (GNY) logic and Scyther tool, which are formal methods to evaluate the security of a cryptographic protocol.

Smart grid networks include various communication technologies, among which, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is considered as an enabling technology for realizing the ubiquitous environment by providing identity to an essential object. We have proposed a comprehensive mutual authentication protocol for a mobile RFID based Smart grid network, which is lightweight and efficient. In the proposed mechanism, only simple cryptographic operations (i.e. one-way hash function, XOR operation) are used in RFID tag, while other techniques including elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and zero knowledge protocol are used in mobile reader and backend server. We have deployed a conjoined verification technique to minimize authentication cost in such a network. We illustrate that the proposed mechanism can better performance than the existing representative schemes.

The design of secure authentication protocols for radio frequency identification (RFID) system is still a quite challenging problem. Many authentication protocols for RFID have been proposed, but most have weaknesses or flaws. We analyze the security of a serverless RFID authentication protocol which recently been presented by Hoque et al. The protocol was expected to safeguard both RFID tag and RFID reader against major attacks, and RFID server is not needed in the protocol. However, our security analysis shows that the authentication protocol is vulnerable to attack of data desynchronization. This attack destroys the availability of the protocol. Furthermore, improvement to overcome the security vulnerability of the protocol was presented.

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.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been widely used in ubiquitous infrastructures. However, resource constraint in the low-cost RFID systems has posed potential risks such as privacy and security problems, becoming adoption barrier for RFID-based applications. In this paper, current security issues in RFID are introduced firstly. Then, we propose a lightweight Anti-desynchronization privacy preserving RFID authentication protocol. It is particularly suitable for the low-cost RFID environment for only the capacity of one-way hash function and XOR operation is needed. In this lightweight Anti-desynchronization RFID authentication protocol, the back-end server keeps the history of the random key update to prevent the active attackers from de-synchronizing the shared secret between the tag and the back-end server. The security and the performance of the proposed protocol are analyzed as well.

In this paper, we focus on configuring a low cost RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) system with less RFID readers and low density RFID tag textiles for stable and accurate self-localization for an omni-directional mobile robot. An RFID system using multiple RFID readers and high density RFID tags has already been applied to an indoor mobile robot self-localization. However, the system production cost is relatively high. To reduce the production cost of the system while maintaining the self-localization performance, we redesign two new RFID systems configured with 20 RFID readers and 5 RFID readers enlarging the size of an RFID reader antenna. Particularly, a new likelihood function of the tag detection with the redesigned large size RFID reader antenna is proposed for Monte Carlo Localization (MCL). Furthermore, we come up with a novel arrangement of RFID tags installed in a hexagon pattern. The new arrangement of ID tags enables both low cost ID tag installation and high performance of self-localization. We examine the performances of robot self-localization with less RFID readers and lower density RFID tags installed on the floor based on MCL(Monte Carlo localization). The simulation demonstrates the validity of our proposed configuration of the RFID based self-localization.

The Internet of Things is an emerging paradigm, which is used to link physical objects with Internet. One of the most common ways of communicating and identifying objects on Internet of Things is using Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) systems between different objects. Researchers have focused on developing improvements of RFID authentication protocols that stave off privacy threats and well‐known security problems. Recently, Khoret al.have proposed a new authentication protocol that conforms to the Electronic Product Code Class‐1 Generation‐2 standard (ISO/IEC 18000‐6C for RFID systems). In this paper, we show the vulnerabilities of this authentication protocol concerning to full disclosure, impersonation, traceability, de‐synchronization, and Denial‐of‐Service attacks. These attacks make the protocol unfeasible to introduce it with an adequate security and sufficient privacy protection level. Finally, we present a new protocol, calledFingerprint+protocol, which is based on ISO/IEC 9798‐2 and ISO/IEC 18000‐6C and whose security is formally verified using BAN logic. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An ultra light weight and secure RFID batch authentication scheme for IoMT

최근 RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) 기술이 다양한 분야에서 관심을 받고 사용됨으로써 RFID 리더 제조회사들은 다양한 종류의 리더를 생산하고 있다. 현재 RFID 기술에서 RFID 태그 데이터 전송 형태는 EPCglobal에서 제공하는 표준 규약을 따르고 있지만 각 리더 별 리더 연결 및 통신 방법은 회사별로 다른 실정이다. RFID 리더를 사용하던 중 타 회사나 리더 인터페이스가 다른 RFID 리더로 변경하거나 새롭게 추가해야 하는 경우에는 사용자가 직접 RFID 미들웨어 개발단계로 돌아가 미들웨어의 내부 요소를 변경해야 하는 상황이 발생한다. 본 논문에서는 RFID 기술을 사용 시, 특히 여러 회사 또는 표준화되지 않은 인터페이스를 제공하는 RFID 리더를 사용하는 경우에 RFID 애플리케이션과 독립적으로 리더를 관리할 수 있는 리더 프레임워크를 개발하고자 한다. 본 리더 프레임워크는 RFID 애플리케이션과 RFID 리더 사이에 존재하여 RFID 리더 투명성을 제공한다. 본 리더 프레임워크는 현재 작동되고 있는 리더를 모니터링 할 수 있고, 리더의 속성을 확인할 수 있으며 RFID 태그 이벤트 정보, 시스템 로그 정보를 확인할 수 있다. 본 리더 프레임워크를 통해 수십 대의 이기종의 RFID 리더 상태를 용이하게 관리할 수 있게되며 애플리케이션 상의 코드 수정 없이 리더의 추가, 삭제가 가능하게 된다. More recently, variety RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) readers are produced by RFID equipment manufactures. Although a transmission standard instituted by EPCglobal is proposed for data transmission between the RFID readers and tags, other RFID reader protocols and the communication connection methods are be in use in other RFID companies. To replace or add the RFID readers of an RFID system, the developers should make changes to the core of the application and/or middleware. In this paper, we propose an RFID reader framework which can manage RFID readers without having to make changes the code of the application in environment with the growing number of heterogeneous RFID readers.This framework that sits on the layer between the RFID readers and the applications provides transparency to the RFID readers. Additionally, it can be used for monitoring the state and the property of all connected RFID, and for recording the RFID tag event logs and system logs. By using this framework, heterogeneous readers can be replaced and added without writing additional code in the applications. Consequently the readers can be easily managed and controlled by the RFID system administrator.

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology successfully integrates radio transmitter and receiver, small size memory space and control circuitry to remotely store and retrieve data via wireless RF transceiver. As low-cost RFID tag can be massively manufactured by semiconductor industry, new applications associated with RFID technology have emerged rapidly such as inventory tracking, book storage and management, and airport baggage handling. Generally an RFID system is composed of many RFID tags (or tagged objects), at least one RFID reader, and one backend application system with database. An RFID tag gains its operation energy from query signals that are radio waves transmitted by RFID reader. Once a tag responds the query with its stored information to RFID reader, usually a unique identity number or string, the RFID system can recognize the tag carrier and perform required business logic operation. As RFID technique is widely used in supply chain management, the corresponding RFID application systems are expected to process and manage large amount of tagged objects at a predefined period of time regularly. Therefore, for large-scaled RFID applications, tag reading throughput is very critical since it will affect the total data processing time. To measure tag reading throughput of a RFID system, two performance criteria are usually adopted: tag reading delay and reader energy consumption [5]. As RFID reader and tag always communicate over a shared wireless channel, it is very easy to have signal collisions during a normal tag identification process when multiple tags exist in reader’s interrogation area. Signal collision results in query or data retransmission and eventually increases communication overhead and time delay of tag identification. Hence, an efficient tag collision arbitration mechanism is very important and critical for RFID systems to achieve effective performance. Existing RFID tag identification schemes can be classified into aloha-based solutions [3, 10, 12-13, 16, 21, 23-24] and tree-based solutions [1, 2, 4, 6-9, 14-15, 17-20, 22]. In aloha-based schemes, a reader estimates the number of tags in its interrogation area and broadcasts the total number of timeslots to each tag. Then each RFID tag randomly selects its own timeslot to transmit its ID without knowing which timeslots have been selected by other tags. By distributing tag responses to distinct timeslots instead of getting all tag responses at the same time, aloha-based schemes effectively reduce the probability of signal collision. However, aloha-based schemes have tag starvation problem in which certain tags may not

Every year researchers and engineers are finding new and useful applications for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems (Finkenzeller, 2003). Because of the growing use of RFID systems, many different areas of research have also been developed to improve the performance of such systems. A few of these areas of research include novel antenna designs (Rao et at., 2005; Calabrese & Marrocco, 2008; Amin et al. 2009), analysis on the backscatter properties of RFID tags (Yen et al., 2007; Feng et al., 2006), mutual coupling between RFID tags (Li et al., 2008; Owen et al., 2009) and the deployment of RFID systems to complex and extreme environments (Qing & Chen, 2007; Sanford, 2008). There are many aspects to each area of research in RFID. A major topic in many of these areas involves research on the antenna design for RFID tags. This chapter will focus on the design of efficient space-filling antennas for passive UHF RFID tags. First, an introduction to RFID systems is presented. This is done by describing the major components in a RFID system and how they communicate. Then, the particular backscattering properties of a passive tag are described from a unique electric field integral equation standpoint and from an overall systems perspective (i.e., using the Friis transmission equation). This discussion will then be followed by a section describing a practical design process of various space-filling antennas for passive tags. Finally, a summary of future work and a conclusion about the chapter is presented.

Hadoop framework has been evolved to manage big data in cloud. Hadoop distributed file system and MapReduce, the vital components of this framework, provide scalable and fault-tolerant big data storage and processing services at a lower cost. However, Hadoop does not provide any robust authentication mechanism for principals’ authentication. In fact, the existing state-of-the-art authentication protocols are vulnerable to various security threats, such as man-in-the-middle, replay, password guessing, stolen-verifier, privileged-insider, identity compromization, impersonation, denial-of-service, online/off-line dictionary, chosen plaintext, workstation compromization, and server-side compromisation attacks. Beside these threats, the state-of-the-art mechanisms lack to address the server-side data integrity and confidentiality issues. In addition to this, most of the existing authentication protocols follow a single-server-based user authentication strategy, which, in fact, originates single point of failure and single point of vulnerability issues. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant authentication protocol suitable for the Hadoop framework, which is called the efficient authentication protocol for Hadoop (HEAP). HEAP alleviates the major issues of the existing state-of-the-art authentication mechanisms, namely operating-system-based authentication, password-based approach, and delegated token-based schemes, respectively, which are presently deployed in Hadoop. HEAP follows two-server-based authentication mechanism. HEAP authenticates the principal based on digital signature generation and verification strategy utilizing both advanced encryption standard and elliptic curve cryptography. The security analysis using both the formal security using the broadly accepted real-or-random (ROR) model and the informal (non-mathematical) security shows that HEAP protects several well-known attacks. In addition, the formal security verification using the widely used automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications ensures that HEAP is resilient against replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. Finally, the performance study contemplates that the overheads incurred in HEAP is reasonable and is also comparable to that of other existing state-of-the-art authentication protocols. High security along with comparable overheads makes HEAP to be robust and practical for a secure access to the big data storage and processing services.