An LPN-Problem-Based Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Wireless Communications

Abstract

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a popular technology, but some problems still need to be overcome. Hopper and Blum proposed a light-weight authentication protocol, HB protocol, which is especially suitable for devices with low computation ability such as passive RFID tags. Later, HB protocol was proven to be insecure, and Munilla and Peinado amended it by proposing HB-MP and HB-MP¢ protocols. However, only the tag is authenticated by the reader in these protocols. In this paper, we will present an enhancement of the HB-protocol family with mutual authentication to have only the legal reader obtain the legal reader's data. The proposed protocol is light-weight because only scalar dot product operation of binary vectors and XOR operation are adopted. Moreover, it is computational secure since its security is based on solving LPN problem, an NP-complete problem.