Lightweight Anonymous RFID Authentication

Abstract

This chapter describes on lightweight RFID anonymous authentication. The widespread use of RFID tags raises a privacy concern: They make their carriers trackable. To protect the privacy of the tag carriers, we need to invent new mechanisms that keep the usefulness of tags while doing so anonymously. Many tag applications such as toll payment require authentication. Since low-cost tags have extremely limited hardware resource, an asymmetric design principle is adopted to push most complexity to more powerful RFID readers. Instead of implementing complicated and hardware-intensive cryptographic hash functions, our authentication protocol only requires tags to perform several simple and hardware-efficient operations to generate dynamic tokens for anonymous authentication. The theoretic analysis and randomness tests demonstrate that our protocol can ensure the privacy of the tags. Moreover, our protocol reduces the communication overhead and online computation overhead to O(1) per authentication for both tags and readers, which compares favorably with the prior art.