RFID Authentication Protocols based on Elliptic Curves - A Top-Down Evaluation Survey

Authentication of RFID tags is a challenging task due to the resource-constrained environment they are operating in. In this article, we present a top-down evaluation survey for RFID-tag authentication based on elliptic curves. First, we describe a general model to characterize different state-of-the-art public-key techniques that provide entity and message authentication. Second, we present practical results of evaluations of ellipticcurve based identification and signature schemes. We analyzed and compared the ECSchnorr, ECOkamoto, and ECGPS protocol with respect to their computational complexity, storage requirement, and communication overhead. Furthermore, we examine different certificate-management solutions in RFID applications and give size estimations from simulated scenarios. Our studies have led us to the result that elliptic-curve based identification schemes and signature schemes have nearly the same complexity. ECOkamoto provides more enhanced security features while ECGPS has been designed for efficient ”on-the-fly” authentication using offline pre-computations. ECSchnorr might be preferred if primitive computation is performed online during tag