Research And Analysis On Radio Frequency Identification Mutual Authentication Protocol

Radio Frequency Identification is a new generation of contactless automatic identification technology, which can identify objects without any contacts by coupling and transiting RF signal. As a key technology of the internet of things perception layer, RFID has a wide market prospect. However, a tag can be read, write and track in completely silence situation, thus leading to the presence of various security threats and privacy issues of RFID systems. As an effective solution, authentication protocol becomes the focus of research.Although many RFID authentication protocols have been proposed, some shortcomings and disadvantages exist in these protocols. For example, firstly, it can’t resist tag copy, replay attacks, DoS attacks and other active or passive attacks. Secondly, it is unable to prevent tag tracking, which can lead to loss of privacy, and the revealed of location privacy can bring a potential security threat to tag holders. Thirdly, it requires tag has enough computational and storage capabilities, which is out of the ability of low-cost RFID tags. Fourth, the search and calculation load of the back-end database is too large to meet the higher requirements of the security and privacy protection of wireless RFID system, and so on. Among the various protocols, RFID mutual authentication protocols require both tag and reader must via legality certified. So the mutual authentication protocols can prevent the common active and passive attacks, and provide enough privacy protection. The requirement of calculation and storage of mutual authentication protocols is equal to the one-way authentication protocol. Therefore, a safe, suitable, low-cost RFID mutual authentication protocol has universal significance to solve the increasingly serious security and privacy threats in RFID systems.Firstly, this paper introduces the background and current status of RFID technology, describes the basic components of RFID systems and its communication models, and analyzes various threats in the security and privacy of RFID systems, points out that it should meet the security needs of confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity and anonymity. Then two types of existed security mechanisms, physical security mechanisms and security mechanisms based on cryptographic techniques are introduced. Meanwhile deficiencies existed in these protocols are pointed out after analyzing some of the classic protocols. The logic analysis method of RFID authentication protocols are introduced briefly. On this basis, the main works and contributes of this paper are as follows:(1). A new mutual authentication protocol based on NTRU public-key cryptographic algorithm is proposed. And the security of the protocol is analyzed by GNY logic. We compare with the existing mutual authentication protocols from three aspects:security, calculation and communication amounts. The results show that the new protocol can meet security requirements of the wired RFID systems, and provide a reliable security and privacy protection. The search and computational time complexity are O(1). This suggests that it is suitable for the wired RFID system which has a large amount of low cost tags.(2). Focusing on the common problems such as vulnerable to replay attack, reader counterfeit attack, illegal access and denial of service attack exist in some protocols which are designed specifically for wireless RFID system. Then a new mutual authentication protocol is proposed to solve these shortcomings in wireless RFID system. It proves that the proposed protocol achieves mutual authentication among the three of tag, reader and back-end database, and prevents the security threats from the back-end channel effectively after the formal analysis of the protocol by GNY logic. Comparing with existing similar protocols and analyzing it from security, storage space, the amount of computation and communication, the results show that the overall performance of the new protocol is superior to other protocols, and it is easy to expand.(3). Comparisons and analysis are made among the two proposed protocols and the mentioned protocols in this paper from performance and security using the simulation and attack software. The results show that the proposed protocol for wired RFID system not only has a higher security, but also improves about 40% in efficiency than Zhang Lan’s protocol. Another proposed mutual authentication protocol for wireless RFID system is the best in the overall performance among the similar protocols. And the efficiency of the protocol increased by about 50% than Zhang Hengshan’s protocols.