ACSP: A Novel Security Protocol against Counting Attack for UHF RFID Systems

Current researches on UHF RFID system security mainly focus on protecting communication safety and information privacy between a pair of specific tag and its corresponding interrogation reader. However, in many scenarios, instead of stealing detailed private information of tags, adversaries aim at estimating the cardinality of tags, which is called counting attack. Unfortunately, most existing protocols are vulnerable to counting attack. To defend against this attack, in this paper we propose ACSP, a novel Anti-Counting Security Protocol. ACSP employs session identifier and provides a corresponding authentication metric to verify the commands sent by the reader. To handle counting attack, ACSP periodically updates the session identifier, and securely identifies tags with encryption. We evaluate the performance of ACSP through theoretical analysis and qualitative comparison. Results show that ACSP can efficiently withstand counting attack while being able to defend against regular security threats as existing protocols.