Weaknesses in another Gen2-based RFID authentication protocol

Abstract

There is a high need for secure authentication protocols conforming with the EPC Class-1 Generation 2 (Gen2 in short) standard. The security analyses of the new born authentication protocols provide some guidelines and lessons that should be considered in the design of new proposals. In this paper, we scrutinize the security of a Gen2 based RFID authentication protocol which has been recently proposed by Yi et al. [8]. Our security analysis highlights important security pitfalls in this proposal. More precisely, we show a simple approach to desynchronize the tag and the reader. Moreover, we present tag impersonation and reader impersonation attacks. Finally, we show how the use of random numbers does not prevent traceability attack. The success probability of all the proposed attacks is 1 and their complexity is minimal since at most one eavesdropped session of the protocol is required.