Changing Hands Together: A Secure Group Ownership Transfer Protocol for RFID Tags

In a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) enabled system, RFID tags often need to change hands from one owner to another during their lifetime. In this paper, we investigate the application in a group context, i.e., transferring the ownership of a group of tags in one session. This is different from any previous work which focuses on either individual tag ownership transfer or grouping-proofs for simultaneous presence of multiple tags. We are the first to integrate these two aspects and develop a secure and private protocol for tag group ownership transfer. Our protocol resolves the problem of dual ownership which appeared in some previous work, where two entities possess the authentication information of the same tag for a certain period during the ownership transfer process. We evaluate our protocol using theoretical proofs and technical analysis.