Supply Chain Applications Of Rfid Reader - Tab Authentication Protocol Analysis And Design

Radio Frequency Identification(RFID) is a kind of technology for automatically object identification,it has been widely used in many fields,such as supply chain management,access control,animal tracking,etc.Compared with other RFID applications,supply chain management has the highest requirement on system's performance since it needs to perform batch processing when reading tags.RFID reader-tag mutual authentication protocol is an important factor that influences the performance.However,the designing of a scalable reader-tag mutual authentication protocol is a great challenge and still lacks effective works till now.We analyze the security and the applicability of a series of existing protocols when they are applied in supply chain.In WiSec'08,Song and Mitchell proposed an RFID mutual authentication protocol,we note this protocol as the Song-Mitchell protocol.In RFIDSec08,Song extended this protocol to realize the RFID tags' ownership transfer,and proposed an ownership transfer protocol which is noted as the Song protocol.These two protocols have the most security properties in the literature.However,we find out the Song-Mitchell protocol is vulnerable to both tag impersonation attack and reader impersonation attack.Attacker can impersonate a valid tag/reader to the reader/tag in a successful tag/reader impersonation attack.We also find that the Song protocol is vulnerable to a desynchronization attack,which prevents a legitimate reader from authenticating a legitimate tag,and vice versa.We analyze the vulnerabilities of these protocols and propose our revisions to eliminate the vulnerabilities with comparable storage and computational requirements. Although the Song's series protocols have the most security properties,their time cost for on-line identification is o(n),in which n is the number of the tag. They are not suitable for the supply chains which require more effective performance.We propose a scalable reader-tag mutual authentication protocol for efficient supply chain management based on its batch processing property. In our protocol,the average time cost of identifying a tag on the backend server is o(logn) ' where n is the number of the tags.Compared with the existing protocols which usually cost o(n) for identifying a tag,our proposal highly improves the RFID system's performance.The analysis shows that our protocol meets the security requirements of the supply chains.