Addressing the Weakness in a Lightweight RFID Tag-Reader Mutual Authentication Scheme

Cryptanalysis of an EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard compliant authentication protocol

“…Due to its low security, some authors have proposed enhanced schemes, but EPC compliant. However, all these schemes have proven to be as insecure as the standard [8,14,19,20]. In 2009, a new mutual authentication protocol was proposed by Chen and Deng that claimed to offer better security margins.…”

“…The authors hold that the proposed scheme frustrates the access password acquisition by a simple XOR operation, against what happened in the specification. However, Lim and Li [14] showed how a passive attacker can recover the password of the tag by eavesdropping over a single run of the protocol and performing some correlation analysis on the captured information. Then, Konidala and Kim proposed a new version of the TRMA scheme (TRMA+) in which the tag access and kill password are used for authentication.…”

Practical attacks on a mutual authentication scheme under the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard

“…Konidala and Kim exposed this weakness and proposed tag-reader mutual authentication scheme (TRMA) to protect the access password [8]. Unfortunately, their scheme was soon found to be vulnerable to a number of attacks that could reveal the access password [5]. Konidala and Kim therefore proposed a new improved scheme (TRMA + ) in [7], which they claimed to be secure.…”

Lightweight Props on the Weak Security of EPC Class-1 Generation-2 Standard

“…The authors hold that the proposed tag-reader mutual authentication scheme (TRMA scheme in short) frustrates the access password acquisition using a simple XOR operation, in contrast to what happens in the specification. However, Lim and Li [9] showed how a passive attacker can recover the tag's password by eavesdropping over a single run of the protocol and performing correlation analysis on the captured information. Konidala and Kim then proposed a new version of the TRMA scheme (TRMA + ) in which the tag access and kill passwords are used for authentication.…”

“…In order to perform the correlation attack described in [9], the adversary first needs to find a correlation between the access password PWD and the MixBits output (PWD and PWD ). Once this is found, the adversary can make use of the relationships derived in [9] (the relationships between PWD and the output of PadGen, where in our new scheme, PadGen is applied to PWD and PWD instead of PWD) to attack the scheme. However, as witnessed in the last section, we have shown that it is highly difficult to obtain any correlation between the input and output of MixBits.…”