An Enhanced Secure Authentication Scheme with One More Tag for RFID Systems

Abstract

Currently, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the key technologies to realize the Internet of Things (IoT), which is widely used in our daily life. However, there are some security threats such as impersonation attack, replay attack in existed RFID systems. In addition, most physical-layer authentication methods for RFID systems are mainly to authenticate tags without authenticating the user. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Au-Hota, a system that can authenticate the tag and the user simultaneously, and can resist replaying attack and impersonation attack that cannot be solved by most physical-layer methods. Our idea is to assign a unique identifier to the user based on the inductive coupling between two adjacent tags. When the user draws the identity identifier on the tag, different identity identifiers correspond to unique phase features so that simultaneous authentication of the tag and the user can be achieved under the premise of ensuring security. The system is fully compatible with Ultra High Frequency (UHF) RFID systems without any modification. We implement a prototype of the system and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate performance. Our results demonstrate that the system has good authentication performance.