A study on low-cost RFID system management with mutual authentication scheme in ubiquitous

Abstract

The RFID system is a core technology used in building a ubiquitous environment, and is considered an alternative to bar-code identification. The RFID system has become very popular, with various strengths such as fast recognition speed and non-touch detection. However, there are some problems remaining, as the low-cost tag can operate through queries, leading to information exposure and privacy encroachment. Various approaches have been used to increase the security of the system, but the low-cost tag, which has about 5K∼10K gates, can only allocate 250∼3K gates to security. Therefore, the current study provides a reciprocal authentication solution that can be used with low-cost RFID systems, by splitting 64 bit keys and minimizing calculations. Existing systems divided a 96 bit key into 4 parts. However, the proposed system reduces the key to 32 bits, and reduces communications from 7 down to 5. To increase security, one additional random number is added to the two existing numbers. The previous system only provided XOR calculations, however in the proposed system an additional hash function was added. The added procedure does not increase effectiveness in terms of the XOR calculation, but provides more security to the RFID system, for better use over remote distances. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.