Practical Attacks on a RFID Authentication Protocol Conforming to EPC C-1 G-2 Standard

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates practical security vulnerabilities in a RFID authentication protocol based on the EPC Class-1 Gen-2 standard, revealing that it can be broken and does not ensure traceability protections.

Contribution

The paper provides a practical attack on Yeh et al.'s protocol, exposing its security flaws and lack of traceability features.

Findings

The protocol is vulnerable to a practical attack that breaks its security.

It fails to provide forward and backward traceability of RFID tags.

The security claims of the protocol are invalidated by the attack.

Abstract

Yeh et al. recently have proposed a mutual authentication protocol based on EPC Class-1 Gen.-2 standard [1]. They have claimed that their protocol is secure against adversarial attacks and also provides forward secrecy. In this paper we will show that the proposed protocol does not have proper security features. A powerful and practical attack is presented on this protocol whereby the whole security of the protocol is broken. Furthermore, Yeh et al. protocol does not assure the untraceabilitiy and backward untraceabilitiy aspects. Namely, all past and next transactions of a compromised tag will be traceable by an adversary.