Secure ubiquitous authentication protocols for RFID systems

Abstract

In this article, the possible privacy and security threats to the radio frequency identification (RFID) systems are investigated and new authentication protocols are proposed which provide the identified privacy and security in a very efficient manner for a ubiquitous computing environment. The approach utilizes the concepts of two very different, widely known RFID protocols, i.e. the "low-cost authentication protocol (LCAP)" approach and the "oneway hash-based LCAP " approach. The resulting protocols combine the advantages of both protocols and eliminate the problems from these. The approaches are evaluated using a variety of criteria that are relevant in practice. The proposed protocols use random numbers and a hash function to encrypt the key to protect the RFID system from the adversary attacks. The hash value is used as a hash address to reduce the search time to locate the tag in the database from a large number of records. A simulation experiment is conducted to verify some of the privacy and security properties of the proposed protocols. © 2012 Morshed et al.