Securing a Low Level Reader Protocol Connection and a Study of its Performance

Abstract

The latest EPCglobal standard to become popular is the Low Level Reader Protocol (LLRP). Because of its recent ratification, little work has been done on this protocol. This paper examines LLRP from an information security perspective. This study is the first to set up a secure LLRP connection. To investigate the cost of securing the LLRP connection, we determine the resource requirements of the secure LLRP endpoints as well as the performance of the secure LLRP connection. The resource requirement was found to be beyond that of current Readers but not of the Java-based Readers expected in the near future. The measures that indicate performance quantified the overhead of securing the channel and helped us to recommend a cipher suite for securing the channel in the near future