Cryptanalysis of the Cho et al. protocol: A hash-based RFID tag mutual authentication protocol

In recent years, RFID (radio-frequency identification) systems are widely used in many applications. One of the most important applications for this technology is the Internet of things (IoT). Therefore, researchers have proposed several authentication protocols that can be employed in RFID-based IoT systems, and they have claimed that their protocols can satisfy all security requirements of these systems. However, in RFID-based IoT systems we have mobile readers that can be compromised by the adversary. Due to this attack, the adversary can compromise a legitimate reader and obtain its secrets. So, the protocol designers must consider the security of their proposals even in the reader compromised scenario. In this paper, we consider the security of the ultra-lightweight RFID mutual authentication (ULRMAPC) protocol recently proposed by Fan et al. They claimed that their protocol could be applied in the IoT systems and provide strong security. However, in this paper we show that their protocol is vulnerable to denial of service, reader and tag impersonation and de-synchronization attacks. To provide a solution, we present a new authentication protocol, which is more secure than the ULRMAPC protocol and also can be employed in RFID-based IoT systems.

RFID technology can potentially be applied almost everywhere. A typical RFID system involves a reader and a number of tags, which may range from the battery-powered ones with Wi-Fi capabilities, to the low-cost ones that are constrained in resources with even no internal power. Keeping RFID systems secure is important, because they are vulnerable to a number of malicious attacks. As for low-cost RFID systems, security problems become much more challenging, as many traditional security mechanisms are inefficient or even impossible due to resource constraints. Some existing solutions utilize traditional cryptographic primitives such as hash or encryption functions, which are often too expensive in hardware to be implemented on low-cost RFID tags. Furthermore, some other lightweight solutions have been reported to be broken, revealing their keys and ID numbers to the attackers. In this thesis, we propose lightweight solutions to Mutual Authentication and Ownership Transfer for RFID systems. Mutual Authentication mitigates the issues of eavesdropping and cloning of tags. Only authenticated readers and tags will successfully communicate with each other. Furthermore, we adapt our Mutual Authentication scheme to secure the Ownership Transfer of RFID tags, which is a pertinent issue in the scope of RFID. When an item passes from one owner to another, it is undesirable for the old owner to be able to access the tag or read data from it. The new user must therefore update the access-granting information without revealing this to the old owner. Tag search is another important functionality that a RFID system should provide. In this thesis, we study how to secure tag search with a focus on low-cost RFID systems for which existing solution is not efficient. These protocols are all realized by utilizing minimalistic cryptography such as Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) and Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSR). PUFs and LFSRs

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.

Wireless sensor network (WSN) have been applied in many different areas. Mutual authentication is an important service in WSN. In 2010, Chen and Shih proposed a robust mutual authentication (RMA) protocol for WSN. However, this paper points out that Chen-Shih's RMA protocol has some drawbacks: (1) user impersonation attacks by a malicious registered user, (2) GW-node impersonation attacks by a malicious registered user, (3) sensor node impersonation attacks by a malicious registered user, (4) privileged insider attacks, and (5) time synchronization problem.

The characteristics of radio frequency identification (RFID) systems introduce growing security and privacy concerns. RFID systems need security protocols to provide confidentiality, user privacy, mutual authentication and etc. Many security protocols for the RFID system have been presented. This paper analyze several of the newest RFID security protocols which proposed by Niu et al., Fu et al. and Habibi et al. respectively form the security viewpoint of data desynchronization attack. These lightweight protocols were expected to proposed security protections for the RFID system and safeguard against almost all major attacks. However, we found that these RFID security protocols were vulnerable to the attack of data desynchronization. Based on strand spaces model, data desynchronization attacks on these protocols were analyzed and described. Furthermore, improvements to overcome the security vulnerabilities of two protocols presented by Niu et al. and Fu et al. were given. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v11i2.1993

There are many protocols proposed for protecting Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system privacy and security. A number of these protocols are designed for protecting long-term security of RFID system using symmetric key or public key cryptosystem. Others are designed for protecting user anonymity and privacy. In practice, the use of RFID technology often has a short lifespan, such as commodity check out, supply chain management and so on. Furthermore, we know that designing a long-term security architecture to protect the security and privacy of RFID tags information requires a thorough consideration from many different aspects. However, any security enhancement on RFID technology will jack up its cost which may be detrimental to its widespread deployment. Due to the severe constraints of RFID tag resources (e.g., power source, computing power, communication bandwidth) and open air communication nature of RFID usage, it is a great challenge to secure a typical RFID system. For example, computational heavy public key and symmetric key cryptography algorithms (e.g., RSA and AES) may not be suitable or over-killed to protect RFID security or privacy. These factors motivate us to research an efficient and cost effective solution for RFID security and privacy protection. In this paper, we propose a new effective generic binary tree based key agreement protocol (called BKAP) and its variations, and show how it can be applied to secure the low cost and resource constraint RFID system. This BKAP is not a general purpose key agreement protocol rather it is a special purpose protocol to protect privacy, un-traceability and anonymity in a single RFID closed system domain.

Vulnerability aware graphs for RFID protocol security benchmarking

Telecare Medicine Information System (TMIS)’s security importance attracts a lot of attention these days. Whatever the security of TMIS improves, its application becomes wider. To address this requirement, recently, Li et al. proposed a new privacy-preserving RFID authentication protocol for TMIS. After that, Zhou et al. and also Benssalah et al. presented their scheme, which is not secure, and they presented their new authentication protocol and claim that their proposal can provide higher security for TMIS applications. In this stream, Zheng et al. proposed a novel authentication protocol with application in smart campus, including TMIS. In this paper, we present an efficient impersonation and replay attacks against Zheng et al. with the success probability of 1 and a desynchronization attack which is applicable against all of the rest three mentioned protocols with the success probability of $1-2^{-n}$ , where $n$ is the protocols parameters length. After that, we proposed a new protocol despite these protocols can resist the attacks presented in this paper and also other active and passive attacks. Our proposed protocol’s security is also done both informally and formally through the Scyther tool.

<p indent="0mm">Identity authentication plays a critical role in safeguarding communication information. In this study, we propose a semi-quantum mutual identity authentication protocol that leverages single particles as resources, significantly reducing quantum resource usage as well as system complexity and operational difficulty. The protocol operates without third-party involvement, simplifying the structure and enabling mutual authentication between quantum and classical participants through straightforward single-qubit measurement and reordering operations. Additionally, if the authentication process fails, the protocol can immediately identify which participant’s identity is unauthorized, thereby enhancing security. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol can defend against impersonation attacks, intercept-measure-resend attacks, entangle-measure attacks, and Trojan horse attacks. Compared to existing protocols, our protocol offers advantages in practicality.

Cloud-based RFID mutual authentication scheme for efficient privacy preserving in IoV

With a trusted-third-party (TTP)-based key exchange protocol, when a user would like to transmit a message to another user, the transmitted data are encrypted by a session key exchanged between the two ends of the corresponding connection with the help of the TTP. Up to present, due to the assistance of a TTP, this type of protocols has performed well in protecting messages delivered between two authorized users. Even this, inflexibility, unreliability, and inefficiency problems still exist in these previously proposed protocols. Therefore, in this paper, a multi-key exchange protocol, named the TTP-based high-efficient multi-key exchange protocol (THMEP), is proposed to provide users with a secure and efficient protocol, which employs the elliptic curve cryptography, a 2-D operation, and a current time encryption key, to exchange their session keys. The proposed protocol not only effectively hides important encryption parameters, but also achieves fully mutual authentication between a user and his/her trusted server. It can resist known-key, impersonation, replay, eavesdropping, and forgery attacks. Besides, the THMEP generates 40 session keys in a key exchange process, meaning the proposed protocol can support 40 sessions simultaneously. It also shortens the processing time, which is 3.78 times faster than that of a specific previous study. Its security level and performance are higher than those of the compared state-of-the-art protocols. In other words, the THMEP is very suitable for IoT applications.

Background and Objectives: Search protocols are among the main applications of RFID systems. Since a search protocol should be able to locate a certain tag among many tags, not only it should be secure against RFID threats but also it should be affordable. Methods: In this article, an RFID-based search protocol will be presented. We use an encryption technique that is referred to as authenticated encryption in order to boost the security level, which can provide confidentiality and integrity, simultaneously. Results: Furthermore, since the proposed protocol belongs to the lightweight protocols category, it is appropriate for applications that require many tags and costs must be low. In terms of the security, the analysis results give a satisfactory security level and it is robust against different RFID threats like replay, traceability and impersonation attacks. Using Ouafi-Phan model, BAN and AVISPA, we also checked the security correctness of the suggested protocol. Conclusion: In this paper, we presented a scalable lightweight RFID search protocol. We employed an encryption technique called Authenticated Encryption (A.E.) to improve the security level of the suggested protocol.======================================================================================================Copyrights©2018 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, as long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.======================================================================================================

The attacker can access the RFID systems illegally because authentication operation on the RFID systems are performed in wireless communication. Authentication methods based on the PUF were presented to defend attacks. Because of Hash and AES, the cost is expensive for the low-cost RFID tag. In this paper, the PUF-based encryption processor and the mutual authentication protocol are proposed for low-cost RFID authentication. The challenge-response pairs (PUF`s input and output) are utilized as the authentication key and encrypted by the PUF`s characteristics. The encryption method is changed each session and XOR operation with random number is utilized. Therefore, it is difficult for the attacker to analyze challenge-response pairs and attack the systems. In addition, the proposed method with PUF is strong against physical attacks. And the method protects the tag cloning attack by physical attacks because there is no authentication data in the tag. Proposed processor is implemented at low cost with small footprint and low power.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) applications have the potential to increase the reliability of healthcare environments. However, there are obvious security and privacy concerns with regard to storing personal and medical data in RFID tags, and the lack of secure authentication systems in healthcare environments remains as a challenge the further use of this technology, one that touches on issues of confidentiality, unforgeability, location privacy, and scalability. This study proposes a novel mutual authentication protocol that considers all of these issues and solves the tradeoff between location privacy and scalability in healthcare environments. A formal proof and analysis is demonstrated to prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, and that high reliability has and can be easily deployed and managed. This study also provides a scenario example that applied proposed protocol in the newborn care and management. The result shows that the proposed scheme solves the related tradeoff problem, and is capable of providing both location privacy and scalability. To apply the authentication scheme proposed in this work would be able to increase confidence in future implementations of RFID systems in healthcare environments.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is regarded as a fundamental technology for ubiquitous services and thus a growing security and privacy concern goes along with its applications integrated into everyday life, often in an invisible way. The possible abuse of RFID's tracking capability raises threats to user privacy. It has inspired lot of research interest, but many measures bring about a very challenging risk, that is, synchronization. Failure to keep changes of the shared secret in step between the tag and the back-end server will cause RFID system out of action. This paper presents an effective privacy-preserving protocol by means of commutative cipher to obviate the possibility of the mistake. In the proposed scheme, the tag output associated to the fixed secret identifier is not fixed at every session to conduct mutual authentication with reader-to-tag and tag-to-reader in turn. Therefore, our work is robust against desynchronization attacks and other security attacks, such as cloned use and man-in-the-middle attack, as well.