Paper 2007/051 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2007/051 ↗

Forward-secure RFID Authentication and Key Exchange

Abstract

Security and privacy in RFID systems is an important and active research area. A number of challenges arise due to the extremely limited computational, storage and communication abilities of a typical RFID tag. This work describes two families of simple, inexpensive, and untraceable identification protocols for RFID tags. The proposed protocols involve minimal interaction between a tag and a reader and place low computational burden on the tag, requiring only a pseudo-random generator. They also impose low computational load on the back-end server. The paper also describes a universally composable security model tuned for RFID applications. By making specific setup, communication, and concurrency assumptions that are realistic in the RFID application setting, we arrive at a model that guarantees strong security and availability properties, while still permitting the design of practical RFID protocols. We show that our protocols are provably secure within the new security model. The security supports, availability, authentication, forward-secure anonymity and key exchange, and modularity. The last attribute is most appropriate for ubiquitous applications.