A Scalable RFID Authentication Protocol Supporting Ownership Transfer and Controlled Delegation

RFID systems allow fast and automatic identification of RFID tags through a wireless channel. Information on product items like name, model, purpose, expiration date, etc., can be easily stored and retrieved from RFID tags attached to items. That is why, in the near future, RFID tags can be an active part of our everyday life when interacting with items around us. Frequently, such items may change hands during their lifecycle. Therefore, beyond RFID identification protocols, there is a need for secure and private ownership transfer protocols in RFID systems. To ensure privacy to tag owners, the keys of tags are usually updated during the ownership transfer process. However, none of the previous proposals takes advantage of this property to improve the system scalability. To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first RFID identification protocol supporting ownership transfer that is secure, private and scalable. Furthermore, our proposal achieves other valuable properties related to ownership transfer, such as controlled delegation and decentralization.