Addressing flaws in RFID authentication protocols

  • Authors:
  • Mohammad Hassan Habibi;Mohammad Reza Aref;Di Ma

  • Affiliations:
  • ISSL Lab, EE Department, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran;ISSL Lab, EE Department, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran;SAFE Lab, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Michigan-Dearborn, Michigan

  • Venue:
  • INDOCRYPT'11 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Cryptology in India
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

The development of RFID systems in sensitive applications like e-passport, e-health, credit cards, and personal devices, makes it necessary to consider the related security and privacy issues in great detail. Among other security characteristic of an RFID authentication protocol, untraceability and synchronization are the most important attributes. The former is strongly related to the privacy of tags and their holders, while the latter has a significant role in the security and availability parameters. In this paper, we investigate three RFID authentication protocols proposed by Duc and Kim, Song and Mitchell, and Cho, Yeo and Kim in terms of privacy and security. We analyze the protocol proposed by Duc and Kim and present desynchronization and traceability attacks. By initiating traceability, backward traceability and desynchronization attacks, we show that the protocol proposed by Song and Mitchell lacks location privacy and availability. In addition, we study the weaknesses in Cho et al.'s protocol and address its defects by applying desynchronization, traceability and backward traceability attacks. We also propose revisions to secure the Cho et al.'s protocol against the cited attacks.