Lightweight privacy preserving authentication for RFID using a stream cipher

Abstract

In this paper, a privacy preserving authentication protocol for RFID that relies on a single cryptographic component, a lightweight stream cipher, is constructed. The goal is to provide a more realistic balance between forward privacy and security, resistance against denial of service attacks, and computational efficiency (in tags and readers) than existing protocols. We achieve this goal by solely relying on a stream cipher-which can be arbitrarily chosen, for instance a stream cipher design aimed at extremely lightweight hardware implementations-and we provide security proofs for our new protocol in the standard model, under the assumption that the underlying stream cipher is secure. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.