Low-Cost RFID Authentication Protocol Based on Elliptic Curve Algorithm

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is the fastest growing technology in the world today. Thus, wireless communication between tags and readers became an integral part of retail products, library books, personal identifications, and healthcare. The RFID system can provide security features to the data transferred along the network to maintain data privacy, integrity, and confidentiality. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is widely used in RFID authentication protocols to improve communication security. Zhao proposed an RFID authentication protocol using ECC where a unique access list for tags is generated with the reader identifier to elevate the security level. Although Zhao's protocol can withstand most of the RFID security attacks, it has a very high computation cost. The authors improve Zhao protocol and propose a new RFID authentication protocol by reducing the computation cost almost to the half of that in Zhao. The proposed protocol shows a significant improvement in the computation cost.