M2AP: A Minimalist Mutual-Authentication Protocol for Low-Cost RFID Tags

Low-cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags affixed to consumer items as smart labels are emerging as one of the most pervasive computing technologies in history. This presents a number of advantages, but also opens a huge number of security problems that need to be addressed before its successful deployment. Many proposals have recently appeared, but all of them are based on RFID tags using classical cryptographic primitives such as Pseudorandom Number Generators (PRNGs), hash functions, or block ciphers. 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 the problem, so we propose a minimalist lightweight mutual authentication protocol for low-cost RFID tags that offers an adequate security level for certain applications, which could be implemented even in the most limited low-cost tags as it only needs around 300 gates.