Privacy-Friendly Authentication in RFID Systems: On Sublinear Protocols Based on Symmetric-Key Cryptography

Abstract

The recent advent of ubiquitous technologies has raised an important concern for citizens: the need to protect their privacy. So far, this wish was not heard of industrials, but national and international regulation authorities, as the European Commission recently published some guidelines to enforce customers' privacy in RFID systems: "Privacy by design" is the way to be followed as stated in EC Recommendation of 12.5.2009. Research on privacy is an active domain but there is still a wide gap between theory and everyday life's applications. Filling this gap will require academia to design protocols and algorithms that fit the real-life constraints. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of privacy-friendly authentication protocols devoted to RFID that: 1) are based on well-established symmetric-key cryptographic building blocks; 2) require a reader complexity lower than OðNÞ where N is the number of provers in the system. These two properties are sine qua non conditions for deploying privacy-friendly authentication protocols in large-scale applications, for example, access control in mass transportation. We describe existing protocols fulfilling these requirements and point out their drawbacks and weaknesses. We especially introduce attacks on CHT, CTI,YA-TRAP*, and the variant of OSK/AO with mutual authentication. We also raise that some protocols, such as O-RAP, O-FRAP, and OSK/BF, are not resistant to timing attacks. Finally, we select some candidates that are, according to our criteria, the most appropriate ones for practical uses.

Review on security issues in RFID systems

“…Indeed, and as illustrated in our comparative study, some works take into consideration the conformity of their solutions to RFID standards [12,18,19,20,20,23,24]. Intuitively, before designing any secure RFID solution it is crucial to verify whether this solution respects RFID standards or not.…”

Providing destructive privacy and scalability in RFID systems using PUFs

“…Our protocol uses one master key shared by all tags. In [10], it is stated that a protocol using only one master key has constant-time identification, but no privacy/security as soon as one tag is compromised. Our protocol provides resistance against tag compromising attack by using PUFs as a secure storage to keep secrets of the tag.…”

“…Public-key cryptography that can be used to solve these problems. Although some recent studies such as [8,9] show that implementation of elliptic curve cryptography on RFID tags is feasible, it is generally acknowledged that PKC cannot be applied to RFID systems because RFID tags are very restricted devices in terms of storage and computation [10,11]. Therefore, symmetrickey cryptography are used in design of security protocols for RFID systems.…”

Time-Memory Trade-Off in RFID Systems

“…A lot of RFID protocols were proposed and developed [2][3][4]. Their efficiency heavily depends on the way of identification of tags associated with objects.…”