Wide-Weak Privacy-Preserving RFID Authentication Protocols

The emergence of pervasive computing devices such as RFID tags raises numerous privacy issues. Cryptographic techniques are commonly used to enable tag-to-server authentication while protecting privacy. Unfortunately, these algorithms and their corresponding implementations are difficult to adapt to the extreme conditions implied by the use of RFID. The extremely limited budget for energy and area do not allow the use of traditional cryptography. In this paper, we address the risk of tracking attacks in RFID networks. Many lightweight protocols have been proposed so far that are founded on both, private- and public-key cryptosystems. We give an overview of existing solutions and discuss the latter ones in more detail. The solutions we advocate in this paper rely exclusively on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). We describe several authentication protocols that have different computational demands and accordingly different security features. To the best of our knowledge, these protocols are the first ECCbased authentication protocols which offer privacy protection against a wide-weak attacker. Compared to other RFID schemes proposed in the literature, our protocols remain light-weight in terms of area and computation time, while still achieving the required security and privacy properties © 2010 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.status: publishe