A feasible security mechanism for low cost RFID tags

Low cost radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are highly resource limited, and cannot support strong cryptography. Lack of assurance concerning personal privacy and information security is one of the main barriers for wide spread usage of low cost RFID tags. A feasible security mechanism is proposed in this paper to enhance RFID tag´s security, but conforming to the low cost budget. The proposed mechanism has a number of security features, such as a mutual three-pass authentication (according to ISO 9798-2), encryption based on A5/1 stream cipher algorithm, and key diversification scheme, which make unauthorized access to the tag´s memory or forgery of tags extremely difficult.