RFID-tate: Efficient security and privacy protection for active RFID over IEEE 802.15.4

Abstract

The emerging active RFID technology over low-rate wireless IEEE 802.15.4 has become promising standard for large-scale tracking applications. Nevertheless, using of such technology introduces tremendous problems in security and privacy. By taking in to account, the nature of common RFID communication is not mutually authenticated, the RFID system is susceptible from various threats ranging from impersonation, spoofing or data manipulation, to various techniques of man-in-the-middle attacks including denial-of-service and replay attack. In addition, the nature of RFID tag basically can be read without authorization. Such issue makes the RFID system is highly susceptible to privacy threats (e.g. unauthorized tracking, spying, crucial information leakage, etc.). On the other hand, the constrained nature of RFID system makes the security enforcement is more complicated. Indeed, common security and privacy solution, such as using Transport Layer Security method (TLS/SSL) is not feasible for the RFID tag which associates to limited resources. This paper presents RFID-Tate, an efficient privacy protection and mutual authentication using Tate pairing of Identity-based Encryption method. It is tailored to tackle various security and privacy challenges by applying a light-weight cryptographic method with advanced-level 128 bit security protection. In addition, the RFID-Tate maintains the computation overhead as optimally minimum. Thus it is feasible to be implemented in the constrained nature of RFID system.