An Efficient and Secure Protocol for Low-cost RFID Systems

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is as an automated identification technology and has become pervasive in our lives. However, RFID systems are known vulnerable to counterfeiting and clandestine tracking. The traditional cryptographic operations are too costly to be used for low-cost RFID tag. In this paper, we present an efficient and secure protocol. Our protocol is secure against counterfeiting by means of a shared secret key between each tag and the backend database, and is secure against tracking through changing the tag’s response each time to queries. The protocol can also resist the desynchronization attack. This protocol only demands hardware support of a Pseudo-Random Number Generation (PRNG) and a Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) to achieve high security, which makes the protocol easy to implement.