A Lightweight Integrity Authentication Approach for RFID-enabled Supply Chains

Abstract

Major manufacturers and retailers are increasingly using RFID systems in supply-chain scenarios, where theft of goods during transport typically causes significant economic losses for the consumer. Recent sample-based authentication methods attempt to use a small set of random sample tags to authenticate the integrity of the entire tag population, which significantly reduces the authentication time at the expense of slightly reduced reliability. The problem is that it still incurs extensive initialization overhead when writing the authentication information to all of the tags. This paper presents KTAuth, a lightweight integrity authentication approach to efficiently and reliably detect missing tags and counterfeit tags caused by stolen attacks. The competitive advantage of KTAuth is that it only requires writing the authentication information to a small set of deterministic key tags, offering a significant reduction in initialization costs. In addition, KTAuth strictly follows the C1G2 specifications and thus can be deployed on Commercial-Off-The-Shelf RFID systems. Furthermore, KTAuth proposes a novel authentication chain mechanism to verify the integrity of tags exclusively based on data stored on them. To evaluate the feasibility and deployability of KTAuth, we implemented a small-scale prototype system using mainstream RFID devices. Using the parameters achieved from the real experiments, we also conducted extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of KTAuth in large-scale RFID systems.