HJM Tree for Security Analyses of Passive RFID Systems

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is not fundamentally new and concerns a whole range of applications. The first RFID application may have been the Royal British Air Force’s “Identify Friend or Foe” system, which was used during the Second World War to identify friendly aircraft. RFID can be applied to a variety of tasks, structures, work systems, and contexts along the value chain, including business-to-business (B-2-B) logistics, internal operations, business-toconsumer (B-2-C) marketing, and after-sales service applications [1–6]. However, the boom that RFID technology enjoys today is basically due to the standardization [7] and development of low cost devices.

Like every wireless device, RFID systems bring with them security and privacy issues to all those people who have been working in this area. Security issues involve classic attacks, namely denial of service, impersonation of tags, or channel eavesdropping. These attacks are rendered more practicable because of the tags’ lack of computational and storage capacity. There are many papers investigating these issues in various ways [7, 8, 10–12, 14]. Today’s challenge is to find protocols (or deployments) which allow authorized parties to identify the tags without an adversary being able to track them, thus getting to the root of the privacy problem [8, 13]. It is well known that the reason not to use well known authentication protocols is that such protocols do not preserve the privacy of the provider. Asymmetric cryptography could easily solve this problem, but it is too heavy to be implemented within a tag.