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

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 protocols for EPC class-1 Gen-2 RFID multi-tag systems

The objective of the research is to develop security protocols for EPC C1G2 RFID Passive Tags in the areas of ownership transfer and grouping proof

Attacks on Secure Ownership Transfer for Multi-Tag Multi-Owner Passive RFID Environments

Sundaresan et al proposed recently a novel ownership transfer protocol for multi-tag multi-owner RFID environments that complies with the EPC Class1 Generation2 standard. The authors claim that this provides individual-owner privacy and prevents tracking attacks. In this paper we show that this protocol falls short of its security objectives. We describe attacks that allow: a) an eavesdropper to trace a tag, b) the previous owner to obtain the private information that the tag shares with the new owner, and c) an adversary that has access to the data stored on a tag to link this tag to previous interrogations (forward-secrecy). We then analyze the security proof and show that while the first two cases can be solved with a more careful design, for lightweight RFID applications strong privacy remains an open problem

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

Efficient Security Protocols for Constrained Devices

During the last decades, more and more devices have been connected to the Internet.Today, there are more devices connected to the Internet than humans.An increasingly more common type of devices are cyber-physical devices.A device that interacts with its environment is called a cyber-physical device.Sensors that measure their environment and actuators that alter the physical environment are both cyber-physical devices.Devices connected to the Internet risk being compromised by threat actors such as hackers.Cyber-physical devices have become a preferred target for threat actors since the consequence of an intrusion disrupting or destroying a cyber-physical system can be severe.Cyber attacks against power and energy infrastructure have caused significant disruptions in recent years.Many cyber-physical devices are categorized as constrained devices.A constrained device is characterized by one or more of the following limitations: limited memory, a less powerful CPU, or a limited communication interface.Many constrained devices are also powered by a battery or energy harvesting, which limits the available energy budget.Devices must be efficient to make the most of the limited resources.Mitigating cyber attacks is a complex task, requiring technical and organizational measures.Constrained cyber-physical devices require efficient security mechanisms to avoid overloading the systems limited resources.In this thesis, we present research on efficient security protocols for constrained cyber-physical devices.We have implemented and evaluated two state-of-the-art protocols, OSCORE and Group OSCORE.These protocols allow end-to-end protection of CoAP messages in the presence of untrusted proxies.Next, we have performed a formal protocol verification of WirelessHART, a protocol for communications in an industrial control systems setting.In our work, we present a novel attack against the protocol.We have developed a novel architecture for industrial control systems utilizing the Digital Twin concept.Using a state synchronization protocol, we propagate state changes between the digital and physical twins.The Digital Twin can then monitor and manage devices.We have also designed a protocol for secure ownership transfer of constrained wireless devices. Our protocol allows the owner of a wireless sensor network to transfer control of the devices to a new owner.With a formal protocol verification, we can guarantee the security of both the old and new owners.Lastly, we have developed an efficient Private Stream Aggregation (PSA) protocol.PSA allows devices to send encrypted measurements to an aggregator.The aggregator can combine the encrypted measurements and calculate the decrypted sum of the measurements.No party will learn the measurement except the device that generated it