Improved RFID Authentication Protocol Based on Randomized McEliece Cryptosystem

Among the embedded systems which were quickly developed during the last years and that were used in various domains (e.g. access control, health, ...) we can cite radio frequency identification (RFID). In this paper, we propose an improved mutual authentication protocol in RFID systems based on the randomized McEliece cryptosystem. The McEliece cryptosystem is not only very fast, but it is resistant to quantum computing and it does not require any crypto-processor. Our work includes a comparison between the improved protocol and different existing protocols based on error-correcting codes in terms of security and performance. Security and privacy properties are proved, and the performance of the proposed authentication protocol is analysed in terms of storage requirement, communication cost and computational cost.