Scalable and distributed key array authentication protocol in radio frequency identification-based sensor systems

Abstract

Radio frequency identification (RFID)-based sensor systems are emerging as a new generation of wireless sensor networks by inherently integrating identification, sensing, communications and computation capabilities. Security and privacy are critical issues in dealing with a large amount of sensed data. In the study, the authors propose a distributed key array authentication protocol (KAAP) that provides classified security protection. KAAP is synthetically analysed in three aspects: logic, security and performance. The logic analysis includes messages formalisation, initial assumptions and anticipant goals based on GNY Logic formal method to verify the design correctness of the protocol. The security analysis with respect to confidentiality, integrity, authentication, anonymity and availability is performed via the simulated attacks, which involves supposing the attacker's identity, simulating the attacker's authentication process and creating compromised conditions. Such analysis ensures that the protocol has an ability to resist both external attacks (spoofing, replay, tracking and Denial of Service) and internal forgery attacks. Additionally, the performance is evaluated and compared with other related protocols to show that KAAP can improve the reliability and efficiency of sensor systems with insignificantly increased complexity. The result indicates that the protocol is reliable and scalable in advanced RFID-based sensor systems.

Group‐based key array authentication protocol in radio frequency identification systems

“…It is an extension to the protocol KAAP [10] which has a key in the same group to resist the attacks among groups.…”

“…In our protocol, the access list of tag includes the reader group ID, the number of which is T. The tag does not store the authentication key, but only a i , the number of which is also T. Then, the tag must store its identifier, the length of which is L. The storage of a tag is 2T + L. The value T is lower than L which is also defined as the length of the access list in KAAP. The communication load and computation load is similar to the protocol presented in paper [10], but the delivery message increase L to update from a reader to a tag. A reader connects with DB directly, so its ability to transmit additional data are very strong.…”

“…Internal attack resistance: The protocol from [10] can prevent internal attack from different groups of readers or tags. Readers and tags of the internal system impersonate another reader and tag from other groups, which can be discovered by DB quickly, because different groups use different k ij .…”

C2MP: Chebyshev chaotic map-based authentication protocol for RFID applications

“…Thereinto, authentication protocols are the principal schemes that own ubiquitous applicability. There are three main categories of authentication protocols according to the weight of cryptographic primitives [13]. Concretely, the ultra-lightweight protocols mainly apply the bitwise logical operators and pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) to achieve safeguard [5][6][7].…”

“…The lightweight protocols mainly use cyclic redundancy code (CRC) operator, message authentication code (MAC), and hash function to realize identity authentication [8][9][10][11]. The middleweight protocols introduce the fullfledged symmetric/asymmetric encryption [e.g., elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)] for the applications with higher security requirements (e.g., finance, and military) [12][13][14][15]. However, several complicated protocols may be limited by the tag hardware requirements such as power consumption, storage space, and computational capacity.…”