Analysis and Enhancement of Desynchronization Attack on an Ultralightweight RFID Authentication Protocol

As low-cost RFID tags become more and more ubiquitous, it is necessary to design ultralightweight RFID authentication protocols to prevent possible attacks and threats. We reevaluate Ahmadian et al.’s desynchronization attack on the ultralightweight RFID authentication protocol with permutation (RAPP). Our results are twofold: (1) we demonstrate that the probability of the desynchronization between the tag and the reader is 15/64 instead of 1/4 as claimed, when RAPP uses Hamming weight-based rotation; (2) we further improve the original attack and make the desynchronization more efficient.