A study on secure RFID authentication protocol in insecure communication

RFID, a core technology that can be used to create a ubiquitous society, is a non-contact recognition system in which a small chip attached to various types of a product transmits and processes information regarding the product and the surrounding environment via wireless frequency. As a wireless recognition technology, RFID consumes little power, is small, and allows one to communicate in virtually any environment. It is thus expected to offer much convenience. Due to these characteristics of the RFID system, however, it may also pose a serious threat to privacy. A number of studies are currently being conducted to address this problem. Most of these studies use secure communication channels between a database and a reader, and insecure communication channels between a reader and a tag. This paper, however, proposes a secure authentication protocol to provide information to an authorized entity by applying the recognition technology in the insecure communication channel even for the communication between the database and the reader.