Enhancements to A Lightweight RFID Authentication Protocol

TL;DR

This paper identifies vulnerabilities in a lightweight RFID authentication protocol and proposes three enhancements to strengthen it against known cryptanalysis attacks without additional resource costs.

Contribution

The paper introduces three specific improvements to the XOR RFID protocol to prevent attacks identified by DFJ, enhancing security while maintaining resource efficiency.

Findings

Vulnerability found in VB's session key permutation algorithm

Proposed enhancements effectively prevent DFJ's attacks

Strengthened protocol maintains lightweight characteristics

Abstract

Vajda and Buttyan (VB) proposed a set of five lightweight RFID authentication protocols. Defend, Fu, and Juels (DFJ) did cryptanalysis on two of them - XOR and SUBSET. To the XOR protocol, DFJ proposed repeated keys attack and nibble attack. In this paper, we identify the vulnerability existed in the original VB's successive session key permutation algorithm. We propose three enhancements to prevent DFJ's attacks and make XOR protocol stronger without introducing extra resource cost.