http://www.chrismitchell.net/Papers/srspst.pdf

Scalable RFID security protocols supporting tag ownership transfer

RFID, capable of remote automatic identification, is taking the place of barcodes to become electronic tags of the new generation. However, the information transmitted in the air could easily be intercepted and eavesdropped due to its radio transmission nature. On top of this, its prevalence has brought the stress on its security and privacy issues. EPC Class 1 Generation 2 (Gen 2) has served as the most popular standard for passive tags. Passive tags possess limited computation ability and capacity that just makes designing of the security protocol even more challenging. Researchers have proposed quite a few security protocols for RFID, but most of them are just too complicated to be implemented on Gen 2. Chien and Chen (2007) proposed a mutual authentication protocol conforming to this standard. However, it is found vulnerable to DoS attacks. Due to the bad properties of the CRC function used in the protocol, the claimed security objectives are also not met. Moreover, the database must use brute search for each tag's authentication. This paper will give demonstrations on what have caused these weaknesses, and more of that, an improved protocol is also proposed which are free from worries of the problems mentioned above. The improved protocol could thus be applied in high security demanding environments.

Securing RFID systems conforming to EPC Class 1 Generation 2 standard

This document consists of a description of attack methodologies and a collection of detailed attacks upon RFID protocols. It is meant to serve as a quick and easy reference and it will be updated as new attacks are found. Currently the only attacks on protocols shown in full detail are the authors’ original attacks with references to similar attacks on other protocols. The main security properties considered are authentication, untraceability, and desynchronization resistance.

/pdf/attacks-on-rfid-protocols-4at6ym5429.pdf

Attacks on RFID Protocols

Internet has emerged as a medium to connect entities across the world for emailing, conferencing, trading, gaming and so on. Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as a global network for connecting any objects (physical or virtual) across the globe, ranging applications from home appliances to consumer electronics. In IoT, physical objects such as home appliances, vehicles, supply-chain items, containers, etc. should have unique identities for interacting among themselves. As a result, unique identification of trillion of objects is a foremost requirement in IoT. RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) technology plays an important role in IoT for solving identification issues of objects around us in a cost effective manner. The usage of low cost RFID tags draws greater attention from researchers in recent past, as the cost of supply-chain items should not exceed much because of embedded tag cost. The communication between tag and reader takes place over insecure channel. Therefore, security concern has become an important issue in RFID systems. In recent years, several light-weight protocols and improvements have been proposed for RFID security. Some of them have succeeded with their security claim, but many protocols suffer from security weaknesses or design flaws. In this paper, we discuss a recently proposed protocol's strengths and weaknesses and then proposed an improved protocol, retaining efficiency of the protocol intact.

RFID security in the context of "internet of things"

In WiSec'08, Song and Mitchell proposed an RFID mutual authentication protocol. Song also extended this protocol for RFID tag ownership transfer. These two protocols are designed to have the most security properties in the literature. We discover that, however, the mutual authentication protocol is vulnerable to both tag impersonation attack and reader impersonation attack, which enable an adversary to impersonate any legitimate reader or tag. We also discover that the ownership transfer protocol is vulnerable to a de-synchronization 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.

Attacks and improvements to an RIFD mutual authentication protocol and its extensions

In this paper, we investigate the possible privacy and security threats to RFID systems, and consider whether previously proposed RFID protocols address these threats. We then propose a new authentication protocol which provides the identified privacy and security features and is also efficient. The new protocol resists tag information leakage, tag location tracking, replay attacks, denial of service attacks, backward traceability, forward traceability (under an assumption), and server impersonation (also under an assumption). We also show that it requires less tag-side storage and computation than other similarly structured RFID protocols.

/pdf/rfid-authentication-protocol-for-low-cost-tags-4ie6p10sul.pdf

RFID authentication protocol for low-cost tags

In this paper we address the issue of scalability in RFID pseudonym protocols Many previously proposed protocols suffer from scalability issues because they require a linear search to identify or authenticate a tag Some RFID protocols, however, only require constant time for tag identification, but, unfortunately, all previously proposed schemes of this type have serious shortcomings We propose a novel RFID authentication protocol based on the Song-Mitchell protocol, that takes O(1) work to authenticate a tag, and meets the privacy, security and performance requirements identified here The proposed scheme also supports tag delegation and ownership transfer in an efficient way

/pdf/scalable-rfid-pseudonym-protocol-2nhcmj6hjs.pdf

Scalable RFID Pseudonym Protocol

We introduce server impersonation attacks, a practical security threat to RFID security protocols that has not previously been described. RFID tag memory is generally not tamper-proof for cost reasons. We show that, if a tag is compromised, such attacks can give rise to desynchronisation between server and tag in a number of existing RFID authentication protocols. We also describe possible countermeasures to this novel class of attacks.

/pdf/server-impersonation-attacks-on-rfid-protocols-2wjnoc7o6z.pdf

Boyeon Song

Papers

RFID authentication protocol for low-cost tags

Scalable RFID security protocols supporting tag ownership transfer

Scalable RFID Pseudonym Protocol

Server Impersonation Attacks on RFID Protocols