An Improved Lightweight RFID Authentication Protocol for Internet of Things

With the widely development and deployment of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology for nowadays object automatic identification, it has became one of the core technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). RFID authentication is a primary approach to secure a RFID system and make it privacy-friendly. There are many RFID authentication protocols proposed to tackle the RFID security, privacy and efficiency concerns. However, with the increasingly stringent security and privacy requirements and limited computation capacity of tags, most of these protocols have suffered with serious security weaknesses and inefficient performance. In this paper, we firstly give an overview on Kaur et al.s protocol and point out the security deficiencies of their protocol. Then, we propose an improved lightweight anonymous authentication protocol for RFID systems using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) algorithm. The security analysis shows that the proposed protocol achieves mutual authentication, confidentiality, anonymity as well as resistance to various attacks, such as replay, impersonation and modification attacks, etc. Furthermore, performance evaluation indicates that the proposed protocol significantly reduces the computation cost by at least 3 times and decreases the communication cost by at least 50% compared to previous RFID authentication protocols