Simulation-Based Traceability Analysis of RFID Authentication Protocols

Nowadays low-cost RFID systems have moved from obscurity into mainstream applications which cause growing security and privacy concerns. The lightweight cryptographic primitives and authentication protocols are indispensable requirements for these devices to grow pervasive. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in intuitive analysis of RFID protocols. This concept has recently been challenged by formal privacy models. This paper investigates how to analyse and solve privacy problems in formal model. First, we highlight some vague drawbacks especially in forward and backward traceability analysis and extend it in the simulation-based privacy model family. Then, the privacy weaknesses of three new-found RFID authentication protocols are analysed in formal privacy models and three improved protocols are proposed to prevent the aforementioned attacks.     

Security analysis of two lightweight RFID authentication protocols

One of the key problems in radio frequency identification (RFID) is security and privacy. Many RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to preserve security and privacy of the system. Nevertheless, most of these protocols are analyzed and it is shown that they cannot provide security against some RFID attacks. Strong authentication and strong integrity (SASI) is the first ultra-lightweight authentication protocol introduced rotation shift operation and RFID authentication protocol with permutation (RAPP) is a new ultra-lightweight authentication protocol with permutation. In this paper, we give the security analysis on these two protocols. An active attack is presented on RAPP, and using the property of the left rotation and permutation operations, we can deduce the relationship of bits of random number or secret keys at different positions, thus obtain all the secrets shared by the reader and the tag. A passive full-disclosure attack is proposed on SASI. Using SASI’s construction weakness, our attack can reveal all the secrets shared by the reader and tag by eavesdropping about 48 rounds of the authentication messages.     

Keyless Security in Wireless Networks

Security and privacy issues in RFID technology gain tremendous popularity recently. However, existing work on RFID authentication problems always make assumptions such as (1) hash function can be fully employed in designing RFID protocols; (2) channels between readers and server are always secure. The first assumption is not suitable for EPC Class-1 Gen-2 tags, which has been challenged in many research work, while the second one cannot be directly adopted in mobile RFID applications where wireless channels between readers and server are always insecure. To solve these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel ultralightweight and privacy-preserving authentication protocol for mobile RFID systems. We only use bitwise XOR, and several special constructed pseudo-random number generators to achieve our aims in the insecure mobile RFID environment. We use GNY logic to prove the security correctness of our proposed protocol. The security and privacy analysis show that our protocol can provide several privacy properties and avoid suffering from a number of attacks, including tag anonymity, tag location privacy, reader privacy, forward secrecy, and mutual authentication, replay attack, desynchronization attack etc. We implement our protocol and compare several parameters with existing work, the evaluation results indicate us that our protocol significantly improves the system performance.     

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

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.     

Review of different classes of RFID authentication protocols

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is an up-and-coming technology. The major limitations of RFID technology are security and privacy concerns. Many methods, including encryption, authentication and hardware techniques, have been presented to overcome security and privacy problems. This paper focuses on authentication protocols. The combination of RFID technology being popular but unsecure has led to an influx of mutual authentication protocols. Authentication protocols are classified as being fully fledged, simple, lightweight or ultra-lightweight. Since 2002, much important research and many protocols have been presented, with some of the protocols requiring further development. The present paper reviews in detail recently proposed RFID mutual authentication protocols, according to the classes of the authentication protocols. The protocols were compared mainly in terms of security, the technique that they are based on, protocols that the presented protocol has been compared with, and finally, the method of verifying the protocol. Important points of the comparisons were collected in two tables.

     

轻型的RFID安全认证协议LAP

RFID标签存在着处理能力弱、存储空间小和电源供给有限等局限性,传统的公钥算法或散列函数等复杂运算不能满足实际应用的需求。针对现有轻量级RFID认证协议的不足,设计了基于广义逆矩阵的RFID安全认证协议LAP。该协议采用了硬件复杂度较低的CRC校验及计算量较小的矩阵运算。通过安全隐私和性能分析,LAP协议适用于低成本、存储与计算受限的RFID标签。     

ECC-Based RFID Authentication Protocol

The radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been widely used so far in industrial and commercial applications. To develop the RFID tags that support elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), we propose a scalable and mutual authentication protocol based on ECC. We also suggest a tag privacy model that provides adversaries exhibiting strong abilities to attack a tag’s privacy. We prove that the proposed protocol preserves privacy under the privacy model and that it meets general security requirements. Compared with other recent ECC-based RFID authentication protocols, our protocol provides tag privacy and performs the best under comprehensive evaluation of tag privacy, tag computation cost, and communications cost.     

Security Enhanced RFID Authentication Protocols for Healthcare Environment

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.

     

基于RFID的物联网安全性研究

通过物联网的研究历史和现状进行了总结和分析,阐述和分析物联网以及RFID的组成和工作原理,并根据这些内容对现有技术中存在的一些安全隐私问题进行重点研究。针对关于RFID的攻击手段,分别介绍基于物理机制的解决方案以及基于密码技术的解决方案。为了满足RFID系统对安全隐私方面的需求,并改善原有安全协议中的缺陷,提出一个基于时间戳的挑战——应答模式的双向认证协议。     

Scalability and Security Conflict for RFID Authentication Protocols

RFID technology continues to flourish as an inherent part of virtually every ubiquitous environment. However, it became clear that the public—implying the industry—seriously needs mechanisms emerging the security and privacy issues for increasing RFID applications. As the nodes of RFID systems mostly suffer from low computational power and small memory size, various attempts which propose to implement the existing security primitives and protocols, have ignored the realm of the cost limitations and failed. In this study, two recently proposed protocols—SSM and LRMAP—claiming to meet the standard privacy and security requirements are analyzed. The design of both protocols based on defining states where the server authenticates the tag in constant time in a more frequent normal state and needs a linear search in a rare abnormal states. Although both protocols claim to provide untraceability criteria in their design objectives, we outline a generic attack that both protocols failed to fulfill this claim. Moreover, we showed that the SSM protocol is vulnerable to a desynchronization attack which prevents a server from authenticating a legitimate tag. Resultantly, we conclude that defining computationally unbalanced tag states yields to a security/scalability conflict for RFID authentication protocols.