Employing Lightweight Primitives on Low-Cost RFID Tags for Authentication

Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems have been aggressively deployed in a variety of applications. RFID security and privacy issues have been intensively studied in the research field, of which the authentication between RFID reader and tag is the fundamental theme. Most of the existing authentication protocols draw assumptions on classic cryptographic primitives. However, for extremely resource constraint RFID tags, only lightweight primitives can be incorporated. In this paper, we propose an RFID mutual authentication protocol employing ultra-lightweight mathematic primitives to achieve secure tag/reader authentication. The proposed scheme is secure in sense of tag anonymity, man-in-the-middle resistance, and forgery prevention that are shown in our analysis. The scheme is also efficient due to fast calculation on reduced hardware implementation.