RFID-Based Supply Chain Partner Authentication and Key Agreemen

The growing use of RFID in supply chains brings along an indisputable added value from the business perspective, but raises a number of new interesting security challenges. One of them is the authentication of two participants of the sup-ply chain that have possessed the same tagged item, but that have otherwise never communicated before. The situa-tion is even more complex if we imagine that participants to the supply chain may be business competitors. We present a novel cryptographic scheme that solves this problem. In our solution, users exchange tags over the cycle of a supply chain and, if two entities have possessed the same tag, they agree on a secret common key they can use to protect their exchange of business sensitive information. No rogue user can be successful in a malicious authentication, because it would either be traceable or it would imply the loss of a secret key, which provides a strong incentive to keep the tag authentication information secret and protects the integrity of the supply chain. We provide game-based security proofs of our claims, without relying on the random oracle model