Security Analysis of a Mutual Authentication Protocol for RFID Systems

In the context of Dolev-Yao model, the authors describe a desynchronization attack on an efficient lightweight authentication protocol recently proposed by Wei et al. The authors show that, an ordinary attacker, who can monitor the traffic secretly between the reader and tag, is able to cheat the authentic tag and the authentic server successfully using the message that he intercepted in the previous session. As a result, the server and the tag cannot update the shared secret value consistently. Finally, they cannot authenticate with each other and the mutual authentication property of the protocol is breached.