RFID Mutual Authentication and Secret Update Protocol for Low-Cost Tags

Low-cost RFID will dominate the industry as a replacement of the barcode tags. RFID tags had been designed for the purpose of automatic identification and tracking. Therefore, RFID tags could violate their owners´ privacy and security. Hence, it becomes a necessity to come up with an RFID protocol that meets security (e.g. mutual authentication) and privacy goals. Recently, the Journal of Computer Communications published a paper by Song and Mitchell (2011) where the authors proposed a mutual authentication protocol for RFID system. This protocol has fundamental shortcomings that can be taken advantage by an adept adversary. We shed light on these flaws and later on we modified SM´s scheme to fix these vulnerabilities.