An Unconditionally Secure Lightweight RFID Authentication Protocol with Untraceability

With the increased adoption of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) across multiple industries, new research opportunities have arisen among many academic and engineering communities who are currently interested in maximizing the practice potential of this technology and in minimizing all its potential risks. Aiming at providing an outstanding survey of recent advances in RFID technology, this book brings together interesting research results and innovative ideas from scholars and researchers worldwide. Current Trends and Challenges in RFID offers important insights into: RF/RFID Background, RFID Tag/Antennas, RFID Readers, RFID Protocols and Algorithms, RFID Applications and Solutions. Comprehensive enough, the present book is invaluable to engineers, scholars, graduate students, industrial and technology insiders, as well as engineering and technology aficionados.


Introduction
Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a wireless technology that uses radio signals to identify objects automatically and remotely. The most popular tags are passive devices owing to their low cost. Nowadays, RFID devices are widely deployed in many applications, such as supply chain management, inventory control, contactless credit card and so on, due to the low-cost and convenience in identifying objects with non-line-of sight reading, However, there are many potential security threats around the tiny RFID tags attached to users. The carrying items or privacy information contained in these tags might be compromised. Furthermore, low-cost makes these tags very resource-limited, which makes it very challenging to design secure protocols for these tags. From the point of end user's side, a secure RFID system should provide the capability of location/content privacy protection, anonymity, untraceability and availability [2]. Several RFID lightweight authentication protocols like [4][5][6][7][8][9][10] have been developed, but not all of them satisfy all the security requirements. All the previously proposed protocols are designed to be computationally secure, i.e., the security depends on the hardness of solving mathematical problem. Recently, Alomair et al. [1] proposed an unconditionally secure lightweight RFID (UCS-RFID for short) protocol, and claimed that their protocol achieved unconditional secrecy and unconditionally integrity. The security of the UCS-RFID protocol depends on the freshness of the keys. However, the UCS-RFID protocol does not achieve backward untraceability, even though it does achieve forward untractability. Forward and backward untraceability are important privacy properties for RFID authentication protocol [4]. Forward untraceability requires that even if the adversary reveals the internal state of a tag at time τ, the adversary still cannot know whether a transaction after time τ + δ (for some δ > 0) involves the same tag or not, provided that the adversary does not eavesdrop on the tag continuously after time τ. Backward untraceability requires that even if the adversary reveals the internal state of a tag at time τ, the adversary is not able to tell whether a transaction before time τ involves the same tag or not [3]. These two properties are important for the RFID systems that the equipped tags are low-cost and potentially prone to being captured and compromised.

Notation Description
The finite integer ring with usual addition and multiplication modulo p  In this book chapter, we first examine the USC-RFID protocol, and show that the USC-RFID protocol does not achieve backward untraceability. After that, we will extend the USC-RFID protocol to an enforced one with untraceability.

The UCS-RFID protocol
The UCS-RFID procotol [1] is a lightweight RFID authentication protocol and is the first RFID protocol providing unconditional security for low-cost tags. The UCS-RFID protocol has the merits that it does not require tags to support random number generation and it requires only one simple multiplication on tags. The security of this protocol mainly relies on the RFID reader's capability to deliver random numbers to RFID tags in an authenticated and secure way. The UCS-RFID protocol consists of four phases: the tag identification phase, the reader authentication phase, the tag authentication phase, and the key updating phase (see Fig. 1 for more details). For the convenience of describing the UCS-RFID protocol, we first introduce the notations or symbols shown in Table 1. Initially, each tag T i has a secret key set (0) i K shared with the back-end database. In the following, we describe the m-th run of the protocol.  holds. If so, the tag is authenticated; Otherwise, the tag is rejected. Key Updating Phase: After a successful mutual authentication between the tag and the reader, the secret key and the tag identifier are updated at the back-end database and the tag respectively as specified in Fig. 1. Fig. 1 depicts the protocol for the m-th run. The above protocol cannot deter possible denial-of-service attacks (DOS attacks), and Alomair et al. had extended the above protocol to prevent DOS attacks and possible key exposure problem. Since these extensions are not relevant to our improvements, we will not discuss these parts for easy presentation, and interested readers are referred to [1] for details.

Extending the USC-RFID to untraceability
In Section 3.1, we examine the untraceability of the USC-RFID protocol, and then provide an improved scheme to enhance its untraceability.

Untraceability of the UCS-RFID protocol
Here we show that the UCS-RFID protocol does not provide backward untraceability as follows. Suppose the tag T i has been compromised and the internal secrets   We can recursively apply the above steps to trace the messages from the same tag for ith run, where 1 im   . That is, the USC-RFID protocol cannot provide backward untraceability. Even though the USC-RFID protocol does not satisfy backward untraceability, it does provide forward untraceability. This is because, in forward untraceability, if the adversary reveals the internal state of a tag at time τ, it is required that the adversary does not eavesdrop on the tag continuously after time τ. It is this break of eavesdropping that makes the USC-RFID satisfy forward untraceability.

Enhancing the untraceability
The key to find the link in our backward traceability is that the equation

Conclusion
In this book chapter, we have shown that the UCS-RFID protocol which is the first unconditionally secure mutual authentication protocol for RFID systems cannot satisfy backward untraceability, and we have proposed a simple amendment to enhance its backward untraceability. The unconditional secure RFID protocol is very promising approach for RFID security. In this book chapter, we have enhanced the first unconditional secure RFID protocol to satisfy untraceability. Our future work is to further analyze and improve the security of unconditional secure RFID protocols.