Efficient and Low-Cost RFID Authentication Schemes
Atsuko Miyaji1, Mohammad Shahriar Rahman1,
and Masakazu Soshi2
1School of
Information Science
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
1-1 Asahidai, Nomi, Ishikawa, Japan
{miyaji, mohammad}@jaist.ac.jp
2School of
Information Sciences
Hiroshima City University
3-4-1 Ozuka-Higashi, Asa-Minami-Ku, Hiroshima, Japan
soshi@hiroshima-cu.ac.jp
Abstract
Security in passive resource-constrained Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) tags is of much interest
nowadays. Supply-chain, inventory management are the
areas where low-cost and secure batchmode
authentication of RFID tags is required. 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 tracking,
cloning, and replay attack resistant low-cost RFID
authentication protocol, Gene Tsudik proposed
a timestamp-based protocol using symmetric keys, named
YA-TRAP*. However, resistance against
timing attack is very important for timestamp-based
schemes, and the timestamps should be renewed
in regular intervals to keep the tags operative. 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.
Keywords: Low-Cost
RFID, RFID authentication, YA-TRAP*
Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks,
Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA),
Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 4-25, September 2011
[pdf]