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Security Enhanced RFID Authentication Protocols for Healthcare Environment

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Abstract

RFID technology, which is concerned as one of the core technologies of Internet of Things, has been widely deployed in healthcare environment and brings a lot of convenience for people’s daily life. However, the security and privacy challenges of RFID authentication protocols are receiving more and more attention. One of the problems is that the current RFID protocols usually use a backend server to store the detailed information of tagged objects, which may lead to the issue of information leakage if the server is hacked or attacked by the adversary. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a security enhanced RFID authentication protocol for healthcare environment using the technique of indistinguishability obfuscation, which prevents the leakage of sensitive data from the backend server. Meanwhile, we extend the protocol to fit for the scenario of cloud environment where the tags’ information is stored in the cloud server. To our knowledge, our protocols are the first applications of indistinguishability obfuscation in the field of RFID authentication system. Moreover, our protocols are scalable and practical, and they are analyzed to achieve most of the security properties of the RFID system.

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Acknowledgements

We are especially grateful to the editors and anonymous referees for their insightful and valuable comments. Moreover, this work is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB0802500), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61672550, No. 61972429), the Major Program of Guangdong Basic and Applied Research (2019B030302008), and the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (No. 2016A030310027).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Shaohao Xie & Fangguo Zhang

  2. Guangdong Key Laboratory of Information Security, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Shaohao Xie & Fangguo Zhang

  3. School of Electronic and Communication Engineering, Shenzhen Polytechnic, Shenzhen, 510855, China

    Rong Cheng

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  1. Shaohao Xie
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Correspondence to Fangguo Zhang.

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Xie, S., Zhang, F. & Cheng, R. Security Enhanced RFID Authentication Protocols for Healthcare Environment. Wireless Pers Commun 117, 71–86 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-020-07042-6

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