EMAP: An Efficient Mutual-Authentication Protocol for Low-Cost RFID Tags

RFID tags are devices of very limited computational capabilities, which only have 250-3K logic gates that can be devoted to securityrelated tasks. Many proposals have recently appeared, but all of them are based on RFID tags using classical cryptographic primitives such as PRNGs, hash functions, block ciphers, etc. We believe this assumption to be fairly unrealistic, as classical cryptographic constructions lie well beyond the computational reach of very low-cost RFID tags. A new approach is necessary to tackle this problem, so we propose an extremely efficient lightweight mutual-authentication protocol that offers an adequate security level for certain applications and can be implemented even in the most limited low-cost RFID tags, as it only needs around 150 gates.