Lightweight Mutual Authentication and Ownership Transfer for RFID Systems

Abstract

The promise of RFID technology has been evidently foreseeable due to the low cost and high convenience value of RFID tags. However, the low-cost RFID tags poses new challenges to security and privacy. Some solutions utilize expensive cryptographic primitives such as hash or encryption functions, and some lightweight approaches have been reported to be broken. In this paper, we propose a lightweight solution to Mutual Authentication for RFID systems in which only the authenticated readers and tags can successfully communicate with each other. Then, we adapt our Mutual Authentication scheme to secure the Ownership Transfer of RFID tags. Our mutual authentication and ownership transfer protocols are realized utilizing minimalistic cryptography such as Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) and Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSR). PUFs and LFSRs are very efficient in hardware and particularly suitable for the low-cost RFID tags. Compared to existing solutions built on top of hash functions that require 8000 to 10000 gates, our schemes demand only 784 gates for 64-bit variables and can be easily accommodated by the cheapest RFID tags with only 2000 gates available for security functions.