Ensuring Application Specific Security, Privacy and Performance Goals in RFID Systems

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is an automatic identification technology that uses radio frequency to identify objects. Securing RFID systems and providing privacy in RFID applications has been the focus of much academic work lately. To ensure universal acceptance of RFID technology, security and privacy issued must be addressed into the design of any RFID application. Due to the constraints on memory, power, storage capacity, and amount of logic on RFID devices, traditional public key based strong security mechanisms are unsuitable for them. Usually, low cost general authentication protocols are used to secure RFID systems. However, the generic authentication protocols provide relatively low performance for different types of RFID applications. We identified that each RFID application has unique research challenges and different performance bottlenecks based on the characteristics of the system. One strategy is to devise security protocols such that application specific goals are met and system specific performance requirements are maximized. This dissertation aims to address the problem of devising application specific security protocols for current and next generation RFID systems so that in each application area maximum performance can be achieved and system specific goals are met. In this dissertation, we propose four different authentication techniques for RFID technologies, providing solutions to the following research issues: 1) detecting counterfeit as well as ensuring low response time in large scale RFID systems, 2) preserving privacy and maintaining scalability in RFID based healthcare systems, 3) ensuring security and survivability of Computational RFID (CRFID) networks, and 4) detecting missing WISP tags efficiently to ensure reliability of CRFID based system\u27s decision. The techniques presented in this dissertation achieve good levels of privacy, provide security, scale to large systems, and can be implemented on resource-constrained RFID devices

SLEC: A Novel Serverless RFID Authentication Protocol Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the leading technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) to create an efficient and reliable system to securely identify objects in many environments such as business, health, and manufacturing areas. Since the RFID server, reader, and tag communicate via insecure channels, mutual authentication between the reader and the tag is necessary for secure communication. The central database server supports the authentication of the reader and the tag by storing and managing the network data. Recent lightweight RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to satisfy the security features of RFID communication. A serverless RFID system is a new promising solution to alternate the central database for mobile RFID models. In this model, the reader and the tag perform the mutual authentication without the support of the central database server. However, many security challenges arise from implementing the lightweight RFID authentication protocols in the serverless RFID network. We propose a new robust serverless RFID authentication protocol based on the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to prevent the security attacks on the network and maintain the confidentiality and the privacy of the authentication messages and tag information and location. While most of the current protocols assume a secure channel in the setup phase to transmit the communication data, we consider in our protocol an insecure setup phase between the server, reader, and tag to ensure that the data can be renewed from any checkpoint server along with the route of the mobile RFID network. Thus, we implemented the elliptic curve cryptography in the setup phase (renewal phase) to transmit and store the data and the public key of the server to any reader or tag so that the latter can perform the mutual authentication successfully. The proposed model is compared under the classification of the serverless model in term of computation cost and security resistance

Towards Secure and Scalable Tag Search approaches for Current and Next Generation RFID Systems

The technology behind Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been around for a while, but dropping tag prices and standardization efforts are finally facilitating the expansion of RFID systems. The massive adoption of this technology is taking us closer to the well known ubiquitous computing scenarios. However, the widespread deployment of RFID technology also gives rise to significant user security issues. One possible solution to these challenges is the use of secure authentication protocols to protect RFID communications. A natural extension of RFID authentication is RFID tag searching, where a reader needs to search for a particular RFID tag out of a large collection of tags. As the number of tags of the system increases, the ability to search for the tags is invaluable when the reader requires data from a few tags rather than all the tags of the system. Authenticating each tag one at a time until the desired tag is found is a time consuming process. Surprisingly, RFID search has not been widely addressed in the literature despite the availability of search capabilities in typical RFID tags. In this thesis, we examine the challenges of extending security and scalability issues to RFID tag search and suggest several solutions. This thesis aims to design RFID tag search protocols that ensure security and scalability using lightweight cryptographic primitives. We identify the security and performance requirements for RFID systems. We also point out and explain the major attacks that are typically launched against an RFID system. This thesis makes four main contributions. First, we propose a serverless (without a central server) and untraceable search protocol that is secure against major attacks we identified earlier. The unique feature of this protocol is that it provides security protection and searching capacity same as an RFID system with a central server. In addition, this approach is no more vulnerable to a single point-of-failure. Second, we propose a scalable tag search protocol that provides most of the identified security and performance features. The highly scalable feature of this protocol allows it to be deployed in large scale RFID systems. Third, we propose a hexagonal cell based distributed architecture for efficient RFID tag searching in an emergency evacuation system. Finally, we introduce tag monitoring as a new dimension of tag searching and propose a Slotted Aloha based scalable tag monitoring protocol for next generation WISP (Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform) tags

Survey on Prominent RFID Authentication Protocols for Passive Tags

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the leading technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) to create an efficient and reliable system to securely identify objects in many environments such as business, health, and manufacturing areas. Recent RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to satisfy the security features of RFID communication. In this article, we identify and review some of the most recent and enhanced authentication protocols that mainly focus on the authentication between a reader and a tag. However, the scope of this survey includes only passive tags protocols, due to the large scale of the RFID framework. We examined some of the recent RFID protocols in term of security requirements, computation, and attack resistance. We conclude that only five protocols resist all of the major attacks, while only one protocol satisfies all of the security requirements of the RFID system.http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s1810358

A New Secure and Efficient Ownership Transfer Protocol based on Quadric Residue and Homomorphic Encryption

In systems equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, several security concerns may arise when the ownership of a tag should be transferred from one owner to another, e.g., the confidentiality of information related to the old owner or the new owner. Therefore, this transfer is usually done via a security protocol called the ownership transfer protocol. If the ownership of several things together transmitted from one owner to another during a single session, the protocol is referred to as the group ownership transfer protocol. Lee et al. recently proposed a new group ownership transfer protocol by using cloud server, as a trusted third-party, and based on homomorphic encryption and quadratic residue. In this paper, at first, we explain some important security attacks against this recently proposed RFID group ownership transfer protocol. The success probability of any attack that is presented in this paper is $1$ and the complexity is just a run of the protocol. Zhu et al. also in order to provide simultaneous transfer of group of tags in multi-owner environment proposed a lightweight anonymous group ownership transfer protocol. In this paper, we show that it suffers from desynchronization attack. The success probability of this attack is 1 and its complexity is only five runs of group ownership transfer protocol. In addition, to overcome the Lee \textit{et al.} protocol security weaknesses, we present a new group ownership transfer protocol which is resistant against all known active and passive attacks, including the attacks presented in this paper. The provided security proof through informal methods and also formal methods such as Barrows-Abadi-Needham logic and Scyther tool show the proposed protocol\u27s security correctness

An access control model for mobile physical objects

Access to distributed databases containing tuples collected about mobile physical objects requires information about the objects ’ trajectories. Existing access control models can-not encode this information efficiently. This poses a policy management problem to administrators in real-world supply chains where companies want to protect their goods track-ing data. In this paper we propose a new access control model as an extension to attribute-based access control that allows trajectory-based visibility policies. We prove the se-curity properties of our novel authentication protocol for distributed systems that can supply the decision algorithm with the necessary reliable information using only standard passive RFID tags. As a result companies will be able to improve confidentiality protection and governance of their object tracking data and more trustingly engage in data sharing agreements

Security and privacy protection in RFID-enabled supply chain management

Radio frequency identification-enabled supply chain systems are in an open system environment, where different organisations have different business workflows and operate on different standards and protocols. This supply-chain environment can only be effective if the partners can trust each other and be collaborative. However, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) involves growing privacy and security concerns in part because humans cannot sense the radio frequency radiation used to read tags and the tags themselves maintain no history of past readings. Counterfeiting in the form of cloned or fraudulent RFID tags is a consequence of a lack of security measures and trust among the partners when RFID technology is used to automate their business transactions. This paper discusses the ways in which privacy and security protection can be maintained in an open-loop RFID supply chain. A cost-based detection of counterfeit tags using different classifiers is presented

Distributed Group Authentication for RFID Supply Management

We investigate an application of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) referred to in the literature as group scanning, in which an RFID reader device interrogates several RFID tags to establish “simultaneous” presence of a group of tags. Our goal is to study the group scanning problem in strong adversarial settings and show how group scanning can be used in distributed applications for supply chain management. We present a security framework for group scanning and give a formal description of the attending security requirements. Our model is based on the Universal Composability framework and supports re-usability (through modularity of security guarantees). We propose two novel protocols that realize group scanning in this security model, based on off-the-shelf components such as low-cost (highly optimized) pseudorandom functions, and show how these can be integrated into RFID supply-chain management system