Security analysis on RFID mutual authentication protocol

Abstract

Radio frequency identification (RFID) has received much attention both in industry and academia in recent years. To this extent, the international standards group, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 31, is in the midst of standardization activity to define the security extension to the EPCglobal Generation 2 (Gen2) ultra high frequency (UHF) air interface protocols for secure RFID communications. In this paper, we investigate a vulnerability of an RFID mutual authentication protocol that was highlighted in a recent letter [5]. Our analysis presents that the attack on the mutual authentication protocol is just a relay operation between a legitimate reader and a legitimate tag. We also propose the threshold values of data rate between a reader and a tag based on link timing parameters of passive UHF RFID systems.