An Efficient Mutual Authentication Protocol on RFID Tags

Recently, as low-cost radio frequency identification (RFID) becomes more pervasive in our daily lives, RFID systems may create new threats to security and privacy of individuals and organizations. It must have secure mutual authentication mechanisms to protect privacy information. However, the previous works on designing security protocols for RFID either do not conform to the EPCglobal Class 1 Generation 2 (GEN-2) standards or suffer from security flaws. In 2007, Chien and Chen proposed a mutual authentication protocol for RFID systems to improve the previous schemes. However, their scheme cannot efficiently retrieve the information of tags from its database for the authentication. To guarantee the quality of the growing popular communication services, it is urgent to construct efficient authentication for both parties of the tag and the back-end server such that the reader can quickly obtain the information of tag from its database. For light-weight calculation power of a tag and protecting the privacy of user (or product), this article proposes the RFID mutual authentication scheme based on GEN-2 standards. The proposed scheme can efficiently retrieve the information of tags from the database in the authentication process. Moreover, the proposed scheme can improve the previous schemes and provide anonymous property and forward secrecy.