Mutual Authentication Protocol for Low-cost RFID

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is the latest technology to play an important role for object identification as a ubiquitous infrastructure. However, current low-cost RFID tags are highly resource-constrained and cannot support its long-term security, so they have potential risks and may violate privacy for their bearers. To remove security vulnerabilities, we propose a robust mutual authentication protocol between a tag and a back-end server for low-cost RFID system that guarantees data privacy and location privacy of tag bearers. Our protocol firstly provides reader authentication and prevent active attacks based on the assumption that a reader is no more a trusted third party and the communication channel between the reader and the back-end server is insecure like wireless channel. Also, the proposed protocol exhibits forgery resistant against simple copy, or counterfeiting prevailing RFID tags. As tags only have hash function and exclusive-or operation, our proposed protocol is very feasible for low-cost RFID system compared to the previous works. The formal proof of correctness of the proposed authentication protocol is given based on GNY logic.