Research Of Lightweight RFID Authentication Protocol

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology that has been broadly used recent years.RFID devices write/read and restore data via a micro integrated circuit chip that is placed inside aplastic card or a piece of paper. RFID readers and tags communicate with each other through radiofrequency in a wireless way, thus subjects attached with RFID tags will be identified. Because RFIDreaders and tags communicate in a wireless channel, the most important advantage of RFID system isthat the components can communicate with each other in distance, compared with the pastauto-identification technology. As RFID technology is becoming more and more popular in manyfields, we have to face the threat from its security and privacy problems, which always comes togetherwith the convenience it brings up. An adversary can track, eavesdrop, counterfeit, and replay themessage sent between a reader and a tag to attack an RFID system and this will threaten the publicsafe and military safe of a country once RFID is implemented in everyone’s daily life in the future. Bynow, the security and privacy problems has already become the most important barrier for the wideruse of RFID technology. Low cost passive RFID tags are more famous than other kinds of tags. Whilelow cost passive tags are always restricted in computing resource and storage, so this thesis mainlyfocuses on the study of lightweight RFID authentication protocols. There are three main contributionsin this thesis as following:1. This thesis introduces the related work of research on RFID technology, and outlines the securityrequirements as well as the security and privacy problems faced now in RFID systems. Moreover, twokinds of methods to solve the security and privacy problems in RFID systems are summarized, one ofwhich is in physical way and the other is in logical way.2. This thesis analyzes and improves a lightweight RFID mutual authentication protocol LMAP.This thesis points out the defects of LMAP through analysis and thus, provides several schemes thatmight be able to attack it. In order to remedy those defects, this thesis proposes an improvedlightweight RFID mutual authentication protocol ILMAP by adding one step to the former one andchanging the data stored in the reader and tag. According to the analysis, the new protocol keeps thelow computation overhead, storage overhead and communication overhead, while is able to resistdifferent kinds of attacks and remedies the defects of LMAP at the same time.3. This thesis proposes an ECC based lightweight RFID mutual authentication protocol. The newprotocol used Elliptic Curve Cryptography to encrypt the communication messages between a readerand a tag to avoid them from being revealed and is named as EBRAP. In this thesis, the performance of EBRAP is analyzed and it shows that, EBRAP is able to resist the common attacks and to protectthe security and privacy of users. The analysis also shows that EBRAP is lightweight enough to beimplemented in low cost passive RFID devices.