Improvement of Two Lightweight RFID Authenti- cation Protocols

Recently, lightweight RFID authentication protocol has been investigated due to the awareness of practical requirements on individual privacy, system security and resource limitation of low cost tags. Research community demonstrates major advancements in this interesting research area of designing a robust access control and information retrieval mechanism for RFID system. In 2008, two well-studied lightweight RFID authentication mechanisms are introduced by Burmester et al. [2] and Peris-Lopez et al. [25] to support tag anonymity, data confidentiality and forward security in which only primitive computation modules such as pseudo random number generator and simple bitwise operation are required. Nevertheless, based on our analysis, both of these two schemes are vulnerable to desynchronization attack. The secret key value, which is shared between the tag and the backend database, can be out of synchronization by just performing a series of challenge-response operations. To remedy this authentication flaw, we are motivated to develop two countermeasure mechanisms which deliver stronger security robustness.