A Gen2v2 compliant RFID authentication and ownership management protocol

Abstract

Passive RFID tags and readers are initialized with secret keys which are updated after a successful cycle of authenticatio. Ownership transfer builds upon mutual authentication where a tagged item is shifted from one owner to another. Since the available protocols provide limited security for passive RFID systems and are vulnerable to attackers, we propose a novel ultra-lightweight authentication and ownership management protocol which conforms to the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 Version 2 standard while taking into account the storage and computational resources of the tags. The protocol is successfully implemented on hardware to overcome the weaknesses of the available protocols. The experimental results show that the use of such protocol ensures security with little added communication and computation overhead.