A Lightweight Mutual Authentication Scheme for Mobile Radio Frequency IDentification (mRFID) Systems

Advances in wireless communication and embedded electronic systems have revolutionized everyday life via inter-networking sophisticated tiny and useful devices. Mobile RFID (mRFID) systems make it possible to get information about entities through portable devices including mobile handsets, PDAs, laptops, etc. RFID tags consist of secret information that can be accessed by an authorized mobile user via mRFID reader. Checking the authentication and authorization of RFID tags and mRFID reader is a very crucial security requirement of RFID systems. Unlike wired communication systems, wireless mRFID systems are open to security and privacy threats. In this paper, we propose mutual authentication for mRFID systems for handling security and privacy issues related to mRFID in private and enterprize zones. The proposed scheme eliminates the need of any extra key management infrastructure by assigning the keys or authentication secret data to mRFID reader on-the-fly for mutual authentication. Extensive security and performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure against various kinds of security and privacy attacks and it is light-weight, adaptable, and scalable for mRFID systems.