Securing RFID Tags: Authentication Protocols with Completeness, Soundness, and Non-Traceability

Although radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is promising, it is vulnerable and subject to a wide range of attacks due to possible tags compromise, difficulty in physical protection, absence of infrastructure and so on. Generally speaking, the threat to RFID systems mainly comes from the illegal reader's attempt to compromise tag identity. In order to protect the tag carries' privacy (intuitively, privacy for RFID tags means that the communication of a tag does not allow an adversary to determine the identity of the tag (non-traceability), however the reader should be able to determine whether the tag it reads is valid (completeness) and only such tags (soundness)), a security model that supports the analytical argument of properties, addressing both security and performance issues for RFID tags is introduced and formalized in this paper. The significant feature of our model is that a back-end database for a reader is explicitly introduced which allows the reader to search key-index set used by individual tags more efficiently, and describe the protocols in a unique way, where properties can be isolated and analyzed. We then propose an authentication protocol for securing RFID tags, and show that our implementation is completeness, soundness and non-traceability in the independent random oracle model.