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Are RNGs Achilles’ Heel of RFID Security and Privacy Protocols?

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Abstract

Security and privacy concerns have been growing with the increased utilisation of RFID technology in our daily lives. To mitigate these issues, numerous privacy-friendly authentication protocols have been published in the last decade. Random number generators (RNGs) are necessarily used in RFID tags to provide security and privacy. However, low-end RNGs can be the weakest point in a protocol scheme and using them might undesirably cause severe security and privacy problems. On the other hand, having a secure RNG with large entropy might be a trade-off between security and cost for low-cost RFID tags. Furthermore, RNGs used in low-cost RFID tags might not work properly in time. Therefore, we claim that the vulnerability of using an RNG deeply influences the security and privacy level of the RFID system. To the best of our knowledge, this concern has not been considered in the RFID literature. Motivated by this need, in this study, we first revisit Vaudenay’s privacy model which combines the early models and presents a new mature privacy model with different adversary classes. Then, we extend the model by introducing RANDOMEYE privacy, which allows analyzing the security of RNGs in RFID protocols. We further apply our extended model to two existing RFID schemes.

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Notes

  1. PC1: Windows 7, 32 bit Catalyst 14.9 1\(\times\) AMD hd7970 1000 MHz core clock oclHashcat v1.35.

  2. PC2: Windows 7, 64 bit ForceWare 347.52 1\(\times\) NVidia gtx580 stock core clock oclHashcat v1.35.

  3. PC3: Ubuntu 14.04, 64 bit ForceWare 346.29 8\(\times\) NVidia Titan Xstock core clockoclHashcat v1.36.

  4. PC4: Ubuntu 14.04, 64 bit Catalyst 14.9 8\(\times\) AMD R9 290X stock core clock oclHashcat v1.35.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Kocaeli University, İzmit, Kocaeli, Turkey

    Atakan Arslan, Sultan Aldırmaz Çolak & Sarp Ertürk

  2. TÜBİTAK BİLGEM, 41470, Gebze, Kocaeli, Turkey

    Atakan Arslan

  3. Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Batman University, Batman, Turkey

    Süleyman Kardaş

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  1. Atakan Arslan
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  2. Süleyman Kardaş
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Arslan, A., Kardaş, S., Çolak, S.A. et al. Are RNGs Achilles’ Heel of RFID Security and Privacy Protocols?. Wireless Pers Commun 100, 1355–1375 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-018-5643-3

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