Extending ECC-based RFID authentication protocols to privacy-preserving multi-party grouping proofs

Abstract

Since the introduction of the concept of grouping proofs by Juels, which permit RFID tags to generate evidence that they have been scanned simultaneously, various new schemes have been proposed. Their common property is the use of symmetric-key primitives. However, it has been shown that such schemes often entail scalability, security and/or privacy problems. In this article, we extend the notion of public-key RFID authentication protocols and propose a privacy-preserving multi-party grouping-proof protocol which relies exclusively on the use of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). It allows to generate a proof which is verifiable by a trusted verifier in an offline setting, even when readers or tags are potentially untrusted, and it is privacy-preserving in the setting of a narrowstrong attacker. We also demonstrate that our RFID grouping-proof protocol can easily be extended to use cases with more than two tags, without any additional cost for an RFID tag. To illustrate the implementation feasibility of our proposed solutions, we present a novel ECC hardware architecture designed for RFID.

A Robust Grouping Proof Protocol for RFID EPC C1G2 Tags

“…In our opinion, this assumption is not correct as any given tag is subject to the same type of attack especially when there is a significant participation by the tag in the protocol, which is true in this case. It is important to note that protocols that use ECC or hash functions such as [3], [31], and [40] are not viable for large scale implementations that use EPC C1G2 passive tags which are highly resource-constrained in terms of computational abilities.…”

An Anonymous Offline RFID Grouping-Proof Protocol

“…After that, a RFID mutual authentication protocol based on ECC (ID-Transfer) was proposed [27]. Based on the ID-Transfer, Batina proposed the first grouping-proof protocol based on the ECC in [28] and proved it can provide proof validation and privacy protection in the presence of untrusted tags or reader. The literature [29] showed that Batina's protocol is vulnerable to malicious tracking and proposed the improvement scheme.…”

Designated Attribute-Based Proofs for RFID Applications

“…To show the feasibility of the proposed protocols for RFID tags, we consider an ECCbased architecture, for example, the one presented in [2]. The EC processor described is very compact and the performance of 1 point multiplication, even when frequency is lowered enough to keep the total power low, is still acceptable.…”

“…The EC processor described is very compact and the performance of 1 point multiplication, even when frequency is lowered enough to keep the total power low, is still acceptable. More precisely, the ECC-based grouping proofs as in [2] require two or three point multiplications and, even in the latter case, running time to complete the proof should stay below 300 ms. In addition our selective disclosure protocol achieves similar performance as hierarchical proofs [1] in which the performance depends on the number of levels in the hierarchy.…”