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Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a technology used for automatic identification of objects, people, and virtually anything one can think of. Applications of RFID technology are expanding and its usage is being adopted worldwide. As such, major efforts have been made to secure the communications in RFID systems and to protect them from various attacks. This paper surveys RFID systems, citing some of their applications as well as the numerous security vulnerabilities they suffer from. Then, some of the proposed solutions that guard against these vulnerabilities are presented and discussed. Then, a novel approach to achieve mutual authentication for ultra-lightweight tags is proposed using Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). The proposed approach provides robust security properties as well as good performance characteristics. A proof of concept implementation of the proposed protocol was done on Java programming language that proved the feasibility and efficiency of the protocol.

In this paper, we present CENTERA, a CENtralized Trust-based Efficient Routing protocol with an appropriate authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks (WSN). CENTERA utilizes the more powerful base station (BS) to gather minimal neighbor trust information from nodes and calculate the best routes after isolating different types of “bad” nodes. By periodically accumulating these simple local observations and approximating the nodes' battery lives, the BS draws a global view of the network, calculates three quality metrics—maliciousness, cooperation, and compatibility—and evaluates the Data Trust and Forwarding Trust values of each node. Based on these metrics, the BS isolates “bad”, “misbehaving” or malicious nodes for a certain period, and put some nodes on probation. CENTERA increases the node's bad/probation level with repeated “bad” behavior, and decreases it otherwise. Then it uses a very efficient method to distribute the routing information to “good” nodes. Based on its target environment, and if required, CENTERA uses an authentication scheme suitable for severely constrained nodes, ranging from the symmetric RC5 for safe environments under close administration, to pairing-based cryptography (PBC) for hostile environments with a strong attacker model. We simulate CENTERA using TOSSIM and verify its correctness and show some energy calculations.

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