ACSP: A Novel Security Protocol against Counting Attack for UHF RFID Systems

Abstract

Current researches on UHF RFID system security mainly focus on protecting communication safety and information privacy between a pair of specific tag and its corresponding interrogation reader. However, in many scenarios, instead of stealing detailed private information of tags, adversaries aim at estimating the cardinality of tags, which is called counting attack. Unfortunately, most existing protocols are vulnerable to counting attack. To defend against this attack, in this paper we propose ACSP, a novel Anti-Counting Security Protocol. ACSP employs session identifier and provides a corresponding authentication metric to verify the commands sent by the reader. To handle counting attack, ACSP periodically updates the session identifier, and securely identifies tags with encryption. We evaluate the performance of ACSP through theoretical analysis and qualitative comparison. Results show that ACSP can efficiently withstand counting attack while being able to defend against regular security threats as existing protocols.

Survey on Prominent RFID Authentication Protocols for Passive Tags

“…C. Chen [ 24 ] proposed Anti-Counting Security Protocol (ACSP) as another lightweight protocol for RFID systems to defend from a counter attack, which is defined as the attacker’s ability to count the number of objects in a system. Safkhani et al [ 25 ] reported ACSP to be vulnerable to major attacks, including the forward/backward traceability attack.…”

A Confidential Passive UHF Reader with Cryptographic Technique

“…In some special field, the security information must be communicated at high rank security, otherwise, it may cause significant economic loss or security threat. The paper [5] propose an ACSP(anti-counting security protocol) method to employ session identifier and to provide a corresponding authentication metric to verify the commands sent by the reader. To handle counting attack, ACSP periodically updates the session identifier, and securely identifies tags with encryption.…”