Lightweight Authentication Protocols on Ultra-Constrained RFIDs - Myths and Facts

Abstract

While most lightweight authentication protocols have been well analyzed with respect to their security, often only little (or even nothing) is known with respect to their suitability for low-cost RFIDs in the range of $0.05 to $0.10. Probably this is mainly due to the fact that open literature rarely provides information on what conditions need to be met by a scheme in practice, hindering a sound development and analysis of schemes. We provide a comprehensive collection of several conditions that should be met by lightweight authentication schemes if deployed in low-costRFID systems. Afterwards,we showthat none of the existing authentication protocols that are based on the hardness of the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) problem complies to these conditions, leaving the design of an LPNbased protocol for low-cost RFIDs as an open question.