Attacks on an Efficient RFID Authentication Protocol

In this paper, we investigate the security of a recently proposed RFID authentication protocol that needs O(1) time complexity to find out the identifier of the RFID tag irrespective of the total number of the tags. We exhibit a flaw which has gone unnoticed in design of the protocol and show that it makes the scheme vulnerable to tracking attack, tag impersonation attack and denial of service attack, if the attacker has the possibility to tamper with only one RFID tag. Because low-cost devices are not tamper-resistant, such an attack could be feasible and we can apply the resulting attacks on authentication, untraceability and desynchronization resistance of the protocol.