Secure RFID Authentication Protocol with Key Updating Technique

RFID systems are being used in various pervasive applications. Therefore, security and privacy protection is an important issue that needs to be addressed. In this paper, we present a secure mutual authentication protocol for RFID systems that is based on symmetric key technique with an efficient key updating mechanism. The objective is to improve the system security against replay, eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks while maintaining lower computation, communication and storage. We also compare our authentication method with some recent protocols that deploy the same cipher (XTEA) by implementing the protocols on the same RF based system. Our proposed authentication protocol provides higher security level and lower computation and communication costs.