A Formally Verified Mutual Authentication Protocol for Low-Cost RFID Tags

In this paper, we propose a lightweight mutual authentication protocol for low-cost Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags. Although RFID systems promise a fruitful future, security and privacy concerns have affected the proliferation of the RFID technology. The proposed protocol aims to protect RFID tags against a wide variety of attacks and especially Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. We found that the majority of the proposed protocols failed to resist this kind of attack. To analyse our proposed protocol, we provide an informal analysis. In addition, we formally analyse the security of the proposed protocol via using automated formal verification tools such as CasperFDR and AVISPA. We also employed an up-to-date privacy model to evaluate the privacy of the RFID protocol. The results show that the proposed protocol achieves tag’s data secrecy, privacy and authentication under the presence of a passive adversary.