A novel secure group RFID authentication protocol

The trend of researching group radio frequency identification devices (RFID) authentication protocol has become increasingly popular in recent years. One of the newest work in this area is from Batina and Lee, they presented a privacy-preserving multi-players grouping-proof protocol based on the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and claimed their protocol have the ability to resist five potential attacks, including compromised tag attack, man-in-the-middle attack, colluding tags attack, etc.

In this paper, we first take a counterexample to demonstrate their protocol is vulnerable to compromised tag attack. Then we propose a novel secure RFID authentication protocol, and analyze its security by merging formal analysis, provable security, and mathematical inductive method, so as to solve the weakness of Batina and Lee's work. Furthermore, compared with another two classic protocols (secure ownership transfer protocol (SOTP) and secure multiple group ownership transfer protocol (SMGOTP)), the performance analysis show that our protocol provides not only a lower tags' communication cost at about 50.0% and 14.3%, but also a lower reader's computation cost (approximate 14.5% and 55.1% respectively), when transferring a large number of tags.