ACTION: Breaking the Privacy Barrier for RFID Systems

Abstract

Abstract-In order to protect privacy, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems employ Privacy-Preserving Authentication (PPA) to allow valid readers to explicitly authenticate their dominated tags without leaking private information. Typically, an RF tag sends an encrypted message to the reader, then the reader searches for the key that can decrypt the cipher to identify the tag. Due to the large-scale deployment of today's RFID systems, the key search scheme for any PPA requires a short response time. Previous designs construct balance-tree based key management structures to accelerate the search speed to O(logN), where N is the number of tags. Being efficient, such approaches are vulnerable to compromising attacks. By capturing a small number of tags, compromising attackers are able to identify other tags that have not been corrupted. To address this issue, we propose an AntiCompromising authenticaTION protocol, ACTION, which employs a novel sparse tree architecture, such that the key of every tag is independent from one another. The advantages of this design include: 1) resilience to the compromising attack, 2) reduction of key storage for tags from O(logN) to O(1), which is significant for resource critical tag devices, and 3) high search efficiency, which is O(logN), as good as the best in the previous designs.

BEST: a bidirectional efficiency-privacy transferable authentication protocol for RFID-enabled supply chain

“…Private preserving authentication (PPA) protocols [1], [2], [6], [7], [8], [9], [12], [14], [21] are such a type of protocols that allow a legal reader to authenticate the validity of a tag with privacy protection. In these protocols, a reader interacts with a tag in a three-round interaction to authenticate it.…”

“…In this section, we compare the communication efficiency of three phase-detector, multi round-checker and two types of privacy-preserving protocols: LAST [21] and ACTION [1] by simulation. In the current literature, also various privacy-preserving protocols have been proposed, many of them are shown to be insecure or cannot provide enough security properties in the subsequent works.…”

High Performance Tag Singulation for Memory-Less RFID Systems

“…The typical applications of RFID technology include inventory management, real-time monitoring, etc. Recently, the RFID technology has also found new applications in location discovery [1], [2], popular items identification [3], traffic tracking [4], etc.…”

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

“…Lu [10] proposed SPA protocol which implements tag ID update in this type of protocol. In [11], Lu further improved this protocol via utilizing spare tree structure to break the connection of IDs among each tag. These works mainly focus on how to protect the privacy and security of individual communication, which means providing a security tunnel between the reader and the tag.…”