Efficient and Low-Cost RFID Authentication Schemes

Security in passive resource-constrained Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags is of much interest nowadays. Resistance against illegal tracking, cloning, timing, and replay attacks are necessary for a secure RFID authentication scheme. Reader authentication is also necessary to thwart any illegal attempt to read the tags. With an objective to design a secure and low-cost RFID authentication protocol, Gene Tsudik proposed a timestamp-based protocol using symmetric keys, named YA-TRAP*. Although YA-TRAP* achieves its target security properties, it is susceptible to timing attacks, where the timestamp to be sent by the reader to the tag can be freely selected by an adversary. Moreover, in YA-TRAP*, reader authentication is not provided, and a tag can become inoperative after exceeding its pre-stored threshold timestamp value. In this paper, we propose two mutual RFID authentication protocols that aim to improve YA-TRAP* by preventing timing attack, and by providing reader authentication. Also, a tag is allowed to refresh its pre-stored threshold value in our protocols, so that it does not become inoperative after exceeding the threshold. Our protocols also achieve other security properties like forward security, resistance against cloning, replay, and tracking attacks. Moreover, the computation and communication costs are kept as low as possible for the tags. It is important to keep the communication cost as low as possible when many tags are authenticated in batch-mode. By introducing aggregate function for the reader-to-server communication, the communication cost is reduced. We also discuss different possible applications of our protocols. Our protocols thus capture more security properties and more efficiency than YA-TRAP*. Finally, we show that our protocols can be implemented using the current standard low-cost RFID infrastructures.Comment: 21 pages, Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA), Vol 2, No 3, pp. 4-25, 201

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

MUMAP: Modified Ultralightweight Mutual Authentication protocol for RFID enabled IoT networks

Flawed authentication protocols led to the need for a secured protocol for radio frequency identification (RFID) techniques. In this paper, an authentication protocol named Modified ultralightweight mutual authentication protocol (MUMAP) has been proposed and cryptanalysed by Juel-Weis challenge. The proposed protocol aimed to reduce memory requirements in the authentication process for low-cost RFID tags with limited resources. Lightweight operations like XOR and Left Rotation, are used to circumvent the flaws made in the other protocols. The proposed protocol has three-phase of authentication. Security analysis of the proposed protocol proves its resistivity against attacks like desynchronization, disclosure, tracking, and replay attack. On the other hand, performance analysis indicates that it is an effective protocol to use in low-cost RFID tags. Juel-Weis challenge verifies the proposed protocol where it shows insusceptibility against modular operations

Security and Performance Analysis for RFID Protocols

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an advanced object identification technology that has already been applied in various industries. However, the insecure nature of the communication channel between readers and tags makes RFID systems vulnerable to various kinds of attacks. In recent years, many new methods have been proposed to improve the security of RFID systems, such as disabling tags, agent management and establishing cryptographic protocols. Among them, we focus on the last approach, which is more economic and convenient in certain cases. The first part of our work is to categorize typical existing RFID protocols according to their security levels. The result is vitally important to RFID system administrators who need to find different protocols to be implemented in their systems. The trade-off to be made in decision is that higher security level typically implies worse performance. We examine the performance in two aspects: the look-up cost in RFID reader’s back-end database and the tag-related cost. The tag-related cost includes the cryptographic operation cost (cryptographic computation cost along with access operatio

Authentication on Internet of Things(IoT)

Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly growing technology that is gaining importance in the area of ubiquitous computing. The main aim behind this concept is to provide communication capabilities to all the things present around us, so that these devices can communicate directly among themselves in an intelligent manner eliminating the need for human intervention. This communication is established by the use of RFID tags, sensors etc., which are provided with addresses to be uniquely identified and to communicate with each other. The main problem with IoT is providing security and privacy. Among many wireless technologies used for communication among devices, RFID technology is the most popular and widely used. Various factors like reduction in terms of size, weight, energy consumption lead to its popularity. So, in this thesis we mainly concentrate on RFID and its security problems. Since, RFID is a wireless communication technology; it is very easily prone to attacks and intrusions from the adversaries. So, we have to develop strong authentication algorithms which provide maximum security so that this technology can be used for the implementation of Internet of Things. But, the problem is that, RFID tags consist of very low tag resources in terms of memory and computational capabilities. It is very difficult to develop authentication protocols that consume minimum tag resources and provide maximum security. So, our goal is to develop lightweight authentication protocols which use simpler operations like XOR, Rot etc. which consumes very few tag resources and aims to provide maximum security