Secure and Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Mobile RFID Privacy

Abstract

A mobile RFID system is a radio frequency identification technology that allows users to read the information on its tags. When this free reading function is combined with a mobile RFID system featuring radio frequency identification, it may violate an individuals privacy. This is because others may obtain personal information by reading the tags. In addition, user tracking can be a problem, because the fixed ID values of tags can be traced in network segments. Although various solutions have previously been proposed to resolve this RFID privacy problem, most of these solutions involve numerous calculations within the tags. Therefore, these techniques can only be applied to expensive active tags with high-capacity embedded processors. In addition, it is not practical to apply these techniques to a mobile RFID system based on passive tags attached to devices because of the increase in the price and volume of the tags themselves. In this paper, we propose an efficient protocol that can be used to implement authentication functions in order to transfer the high-performance calculation functions to mobile devices, thus storing only the resulting values on the tags. This study mainly focuses on improving the limitations of the existing RFID authentication functions, which usually assume active tags. It shows that the same security level and performance can be obtained through passive tags. The proposed protocol meets various security requirements such as tag protection, location- and traffic-tracking prevention; the proposed protocol also meets other requirements such as lightweightness and the desired level of performance.