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Low-cost authentication protocol for passive, computation capable RFID tags

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Abstract

Authentication of products and humans is one of the major future applications of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology. None of the recent RFID technology related authentication approaches has been fully convincing. Either these schemes offer a low-level of security or they are vulnerable to Denial-of-Service attacks that keep the authentication system from proper functioning. Some schemes raise privacy and security concerns as they reveal confidential information about the RFID tag bearer and allow their world-wide tracking. In this paper, we present a novel cryptographic authentication protocol that fills the security holes imposed by RFID technology. Moreover, it provides significantly lower cost in terms of computational effort and communication than currently proposed protocols such as Mutual Authentication Protocol (MAP) and Yet Another Trivial Authentication Protocol\(^{*}\, (\hbox {YA-TRAP}^{*})\). We also present the implementation of our cryptographic authentication protocol on a real passive computation capable RFID tag known as Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform. The experimental results show that our protocol has double the rate of successful authentication as comapred to \(\hbox {YA-TRAP}^{*}\) and MAP. It also takes 33 % less time to authenticate.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the financial support of NSERC Canada. Furthermore, we would like to thank INTEL Research Seattle for providing WISP tags and CMC microsystems for the other equipment, which allowed us to implement and test our protocol.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, ON, M5B2K3, Canada

    Gul N. Khan & Markus Moessner

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  1. Gul N. Khan
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  2. Markus Moessner
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Correspondence to Gul N. Khan.

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Khan, G.N., Moessner, M. Low-cost authentication protocol for passive, computation capable RFID tags. Wireless Netw 21, 565–580 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-014-0803-1

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