Providing Stronger Authentication at a Low Cost to RFID Tags Operating under the EPCglobal Framework

In 2006, EPCglobal and the International Organization for Standards (ISO) ratified the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 (Gen-2) standard and the ISO 18000 standard respectively. These efforts represented major advancements in the direction of universal standardization for low-cost RFID tags. However, a cause for concern is that security issues do not seem to be properly addressed in these standards. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme for use under the EPCglobal framework. The scheme is based on previous work by Konidala and Kim. We attempt to mitigate the weaknesses observed in the original scheme, and at the same time, consider other possible adversarial threats, as well as constraints on low-cost RFID tags requirements.