Security Improvement in Authentication Protocol for Gen-2 Based RFID System

The EPC Class-1 Generation-2 specification(Gen-2 in brief) is widely accepted as the standard for RFID tags under grant number ISO18000-6c. However, there are two problems in view of its security authentication protocols. First of all, there is no unified standard for the security requirements, such as which threats should be protected against. Secondly, there is no widely acceptable means to guarantee the security, for the provable security methods are not applicable without using encryption function or hash function. In this paper, we study the security requirements presented in the current Gen-2 based RFID authentication protocols, and summarize an Enhancing Security Standard that contains all 10 security characteristics discussed in literatures [10-17]. We point out the security drawbacks of Chien’s mutual authentication protocol[10] , and improve the protocol based on the 10 security requirements. Our improved protocol merely uses CRC and PRNG operations supported by Gen-2 that require very low communication and computation loads. We also develop two methods based on BAN logic and AVISTA to prove the security of RFID protocol. BAN logic is used to give the proof of protocol correctness, and AVISTA is used to affirm the authentication and secrecy properties.