Secure multiple group ownership transfer protocol for mobile RFID

With the combination of mobile devices and readers in recent years, mobile Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems have been widely deployed in mobile identification. E-commerce, for instance, has applied many of mobile RFID's deriving services, one of which is the transfer of a tagged item's ownership in supply chains. However, current tag ownership transfer protocols can only transfer one tag at a time. For example, Yang et al.'s Secure Ownership Transfer Protocol is designed for low-cost lightweight RFID tags but it can only do one tag a time. For this reason, we propose a secure RFID protocol for group ownership transfer. We can transfer group(s) of tags' ownership in one attempt. Since the two supplicants involved in ownership transfer are usually under different servers' authorities, our protocol is designed to allow authority-crossing ownership transfer in a mobile RFID environment. Besides, it is able to assign its transfer targets and to secure against most RFID attacks. (C) 2012 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.