An improved HB+ protocol and its application to EPC global Class-1 Gen-2 tags

Abstract

RFID is a key technology that can be used to create the pervasive society. The EPCglobal class-1 gen-2 specification is an important standard for RFID. The tags conforming to this standard have limited computing and storing resources, and no more attentions are paid to their security and privacy. So the application of these tags is not secure. HB+ protocol is one of the typical lightweight authentication protocols suitable to these low-cost RFID tags. But it is vulnerable to active attacks. For some scenarios with frequent active attacks the efficiency of HB+ protocol will be degraded seriously. In order to improve the security and efficiency of HB+ protocol for some scenarios with frequent active attacks, a novel detection-exit-restart mechanism is proposed to monitor the integrity of the exchanged messages between the reader and the tag. The improved HB+ protocol can resist active attacks and it is more efficient and secure than HB+ protocol. This protocol only uses the computing resources embedded in tags and it is very suitable to low-cost RFID systems.