Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the leading technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) to create an efficient and reliable system to securely identify objects in many environments such as business, health, and manufacturing areas. Recent RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to satisfy the security features of RFID communication. In this article, we identify and review some of the most recent and enhanced authentication protocols that mainly focus on the authentication between a reader and a tag. However, the scope of this survey includes only passive tags protocols, due to the large scale of the RFID framework. We examined some of the recent RFID protocols in term of security requirements, computation, and attack resistance. We conclude that only five protocols resist all of the major attacks, while only one protocol satisfies all of the security requirements of the RFID system.

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Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology that has grown in popularity and in the applications of use. However, there are major issues regarding security and privacy with respect to RFID technology which have caught the interest of many researchers. There are significant challenges which must be overcome to resolve RFID security and privacy issues. One reason is the constraints attached to the provision of security and privacy in RFID systems. Along with meeting the security and privacy needs of RFID technology, solutions must be inexpensive, practical, reliable, scalable, flexible, inter-organizational, and long-lasting. To make RFID identifiers effective and efficient they must identify the item(s) while resisting attacks aimed at obtaining the tag’s information and compromising the system or making it possible to bypass the protection RFID tags are supposed to provide. Different authentication methods have been proposed, researched, and evaluated in the literature. In this work, we proposed our methodology in evaluating RFID authentication, and a few of the most promising authentication methods are reviewed, compared, and ranked in order to arrive at a possible best choice of protocol to use.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm that has been evolving into the wireless sensor networks to expand the scope of networked devices (or things). This evolution drives communication engineers to design secure and reliable communication at a low cost for many network applications such as radio frequency identification (RFID). In the RFID system, servers, readers, and tags communicate wirelessly. Therefore, mutual authentication is necessary to ensure secure communication. Normally, a central server supports the authentication of readers and tags by distributing and managing the credentials. Recent lightweight RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to satisfy the security features of RFID networks. Using a serverless RFID system is an alternative solution to using a central server. In this model, both the reader and the tag perform mutual authentication without the need for the central server. However, many security challenges arise from implementing lightweight authentication protocols in serverless RFID systems. We propose a new secure serverless RFID authentication protocol based on the famous elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The protocol also maintains the confidentiality and privacy of the messages, tag information, and location. Although most of the current serverless protocols assume secure channels in the setup phase, we assume an insecure environment during the setup phase between the servers, readers, and tags. We ensure that the credentials can be renewed by any checkpoint server in the mobile RFID network. Thus, we implement ECC in the setup phase (renewal phase), to transmit and store the communication credentials of the server to multiple readers so that the tags can perform the mutual authentication successfully while far from the server. The proposed protocol is compared with other serverless frameworks proposed in the literature in terms of computation cost and attacks resistance.

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