A light-weight mutual authentication protocol for ISO 18000-6B standard RFID system

Low-cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are highly resource and computational power limited, so that it can not support strong cryptography. To solve the security and privacy of low-cost RFID system, many schemes have appeared, but most of them are based on classical cryptographic primitives such as Pseudorandom Number Generators, hash functions, and block ciphers. A new approach is necessary to tackle the problem of resource consuming and synchronism of secrets updating, so we propose a light-weight mutual authentication protocol for RFID tags complied with ISO 18000-6B standard, which could be implemented in the low-cost tags as it only needs about 1000 gates. Through security analysis and performance analysis, the proposed protocol is approved to be very efficient.