Tag Ownership Transfer in Radio Frequency Identification Systems: A Survey of Existing Protocols and Open Challenges

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a modern approach to identify and track several assets at once in a supply chain environment. In many RFID applications, tagged items are frequently transferred from one owner to another. Thus, there is a need for secure ownership transfer (OT) protocols that can perform the transfer while, at the same time, protect the privacy of owners. Several protocols have been proposed in an attempt to fulfill this requirement. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and systematic review of the RFID OT protocols that appeared over the years of 2005-2018. In addition, we compare these protocols based on the security goals which involve their support of OT properties and their resistance to attacks. From the presented comparison, we draw attention to the open issues in this field and provide suggestions for the direction that future research should follow. Furthermore, we suggest a set of guidelines to be considered in the design of new protocols. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey that reviews the available OT protocols from the early start up to the current state of the art

Secure ownership transfer in multi-tag/multi-owner passive RFID systems

In this paper we propose a secure ownership transfer protocol for a multi-tag and multi-owner RFID environment. Most of the existing work in this area do not comply with the EPC Global Class-1 Gen-2 (C1G2) standard since they use expensive hash operations or sophisticated encryption schemes that cannot be implemented on low-cost passive tags that are highly resource constrained. Our work aims to fill this gap by proposing a protocol based on simple XOR and 128-bit Pseudo Random Number Generators (PRNG), operations that can be easily implemented on low-cost passive RFID tags. The protocol thus achieves EPC C1G2 compliance while meeting the security requirements. Also, our protocol provides additional protection using a blind-factor to prevent tracking attacks

Practical Schemes For Privacy & Security Enhanced RFID

Proper privacy protection in RFID systems is important. However, many of the schemes known are impractical, either because they use hash functions instead of the more hardware efficient symmetric encryption schemes as a efficient cryptographic primitive, or because they incur a rather costly key search time penalty at the reader. Moreover, they do not allow for dynamic, fine-grained access control to the tag that cater for more complex usage scenarios. In this paper we investigate such scenarios, and propose a model and corresponding privacy friendly protocols for efficient and fine-grained management of access permissions to tags. In particular we propose an efficient mutual authentication protocol between a tag and a reader that achieves a reasonable level of privacy, using only symmetric key cryptography on the tag, while not requiring a costly key-search algorithm at the reader side. Moreover, our protocol is able to recover from stolen readers.Comment: 18 page

RFID ownership transfer with positive secrecy capacity channels

RFID ownership transfer protocols (OTPs) transfer tag ownership rights. Recently, there has been considerable interest in such protocols, however, guaranteeing privacy for symmetric-key settings without trusted third parties (TTPs) is a challenge still unresolved. In this paper, we address this issue and show that it can be solved by using channels with positive secrecy capacity. We implement these channels with noisy tags and provide practical values, thus proving that perfect secrecy is theoretically possible. We then define a communication model that captures spatiotemporal events and describe a first example of symmetric-key based OTP that: (i) is formally secure in the proposed communication model and (ii) achieves privacy with a noisy tag wiretap channel without TTPs

Security and privacy in RFID systems

Vu que les tags RFID sont actuellement en phase de large déploiement dans le cadre de plusieurs applications (comme les paiements automatiques, le contrôle d'accès à distance, et la gestion des chaînes d approvisionnement), il est important de concevoir des protocoles de sécurité garantissant la protection de la vie privée des détenteurs de tags RFID. Or, la conception de ces protocoles est régie par les limitations en termes de puissance et de calcul de la technologie RFID, et par les modèles de sécurité qui sont à notre avis trop forts pour des systèmes aussi contraints que les tags RFID. De ce fait, on limite dans cette thèse le modèle de sécurité; en particulier, un adversaire ne peut pas observer toutes les interactions entre tags et lecteurs. Cette restriction est réaliste notamment dans le contexte de la gestion des chaînes d approvisionnement qui est l application cible de ce travail. Sous cette hypothèse, on présente quatre protocoles cryptographiques assurant une meilleure collaboration entre les différents partenaires de la chaîne d approvisionnement. D abord, on propose un protocole de transfert de propriété des tags RFID, qui garantit l authentification des tags en temps constant alors que les tags implémentent uniquement des algorithmes symétriques, et qui permet de vérifier l'authenticité de l origine des tags. Ensuite, on aborde le problème d'authenticité des produits en introduisant deux protocoles de sécurité qui permettent à un ensemble de vérificateurs de vérifier que des tags sans capacité de calcul ont emprunté des chemins valides dans la chaîne d approvisionnement. Le dernier résultat présenté dans cette thèse est un protocole d appariement d objets utilisant des tags sans capacité de calcul , qui vise l automatisation des inspections de sécurité dans la chaîne d approvisionnement lors du transport des produits dangereux. Les protocoles introduits dans cette thèse utilisent les courbes elliptiques et les couplages bilinéaires qui permettent la construction des algorithmes de signature et de chiffrement efficaces, et qui minimisent donc le stockage et le calcul dans les systèmes RFID. De plus, la sécurité de ces protocoles est démontrée sous des modèles formels bien définis qui prennent en compte les limitations et les contraintes des tags RFID, et les exigences strictes en termes de sécurité et de la protection de la vie privée des chaines d approvisionnement.While RFID systems are one of the key enablers helping the prototype of pervasive computer applications, the deployment of RFID technologies also comes with new privacy and security concerns ranging from people tracking and industrial espionage to produ ct cloning and denial of service. Cryptographic solutions to tackle these issues were in general challenged by the limited resources of RFID tags, and by the formalizations of RFID privacy that are believed to be too strong for such constrained devices. It follows that most of the existing RFID-based cryptographic schemes failed at ensuring tag privacy without sacrificing RFID scalability or RFID cost effectiveness. In this thesis, we therefore relax the existing definitions of tag privacy to bridge the gap between RFID privacy in theory and RFID privacy in practice, by assuming that an adversary cannot continuously monitor tags. Under this assumption, we are able to design sec ure and privacy preserving multi-party protocols for RFID-enabled supply chains. Namely, we propose a protocol for tag ownership transfer that features constant-time authentication while tags are only required to compute hash functions. Then, we tackle the problem of product genuineness verification by introducing two protocols for product tracking in the supply chain that rely on storage only tags. Finally, we present a solution for item matching that uses storage only tags and aims at the automation of safety inspections in the supply chain.The protocols presented in this manuscript rely on operations performed in subgroups of elliptic curves that allow for the construction of short encryptions and signatures, resulting in minimal storage requirements for RFID tags. Moreover, the privacy and the security of these protocols are proven under well defined formal models that take into account the computational limitations of RFID technology and the stringent privacy and security requirements of each targeted supply chain application.PARIS-Télécom ParisTech (751132302) / SudocSudocFranceF

AnonPri: A Secure Anonymous Private Authentication Protocol for RFID Systems

Privacy preservation in RFID systems is a very important issue in modern day world. Privacy activists have been worried about the invasion of user privacy while using various RFID systems and services. Hence, significant efforts have been made to design RFID systems that preserve users\u27 privacy. Majority of the privacy preserving protocols for RFID systems require the reader to search all tags in the system in order to identify a single RFID tag which not efficient for large scale systems. In order to achieve high-speed authentication in large-scale RFID systems, researchers propose tree-based approaches, in which any pair of tags share a number of key components. Another technique is to perform group-based authentication that improves the tradeoff between scalability and privacy by dividing the tags into a number of groups. This novel authentication scheme ensures privacy of the tags. However, the level of privacy provided by the scheme decreases as more and more tags are compromised. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a group based anonymous private authentication protocol (AnonPri) that provides higher level of privacy than the above mentioned group based scheme and achieves better efficiency (in terms of providing privacy) than the approaches that prompt the reader to perform an exhaustive search. Our protocol guarantees that the adversary cannot link the tag responses even if she can learn the identifier of the tags. Our evaluation results demonstrates that the level of privacy provided by AnonPri is higher than that of the group based authentication technique

In Things We Trust? Towards trustability in the Internet of Things

This essay discusses the main privacy, security and trustability issues with the Internet of Things

AnonPri: A Secure Anonymous Private Authentication Protocol for RFID Systems

Privacy preservation in RFID systems is a very important issue in modern day world. Privacy activists have been worried about the invasion of user privacy while using various RFID systems and services. Hence, significant efforts have been made to design RFID systems that preserve users\u27 privacy. Majority of the privacy preserving protocols for RFID systems require the reader to search all tags in the system in order to identify a single RFID tag which not efficient for large scale systems. In order to achieve high-speed authentication in large-scale RFID systems, researchers propose tree-based approaches, in which any pair of tags share a number of key components. Another technique is to perform group-based authentication that improves the tradeoff between scalability and privacy by dividing the tags into a number of groups. This novel authentication scheme ensures privacy of the tags. However, the level of privacy provided by the scheme decreases as more and more tags are compromised. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a group based anonymous private authentication protocol (AnonPri) that provides higher level of privacy than the above mentioned group based scheme and achieves better efficiency (in terms of providing privacy) than the approaches that prompt the reader to perform an exhaustive search. Our protocol guarantees that the adversary cannot link the tag responses even if she can learn the identifier of the tags. Our evaluation results demonstrates that the level of privacy provided by AnonPri is higher than that of the group based authentication technique