Cryptanalysis and enhancement of two low cost rfid authentication protocols

TL;DR

This paper analyzes two lightweight RFID authentication protocols, revealing vulnerabilities to de-synchronization and tracking attacks, and proposes solutions to enhance their security for practical RFID applications.

Contribution

It provides a detailed cryptanalysis of two low-cost RFID protocols and offers security improvements to prevent de-synchronization and tracking vulnerabilities.

Findings

Both protocols are vulnerable to de-synchronization attacks.

The protocols can be exploited to track RFID tags.

Proposed fixes improve protocol security against identified attacks.

Abstract

Widespread attention is recently paid upon RFID system structure considering its ease of deployment over an extensive range of applications. Due to its several advantages, many technical articles are published to improve its capabilities over specific system implementations. Recently, a lightweight anti-de-synchronization RFID authentication protocol and a lightweight binding proof protocol to guard patient safety are proposed. This contribution provides enough evidence to prove the first introduced protocol vulnerability to de-synchronization attack. It also provides the other protocol's suffering from de-synchronization attack as well as tracking the movements of the tags. This paper also addresses appropriate solutions to fix the security flaws concerning the two described protocols for secure RFID applications.