A privacy-preserving lightweight authentication protocol for low-cost RFID tags

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an emerging technology for automatic object identification. For successful deployment of tags, a RFID system should provide effective protection over security and privacy. In particular, traceability is the main concern for user privacy. To address these issues, mutual authentication between the reader and tags is required when deploying a RFID system. Unfortunately, because low-cost RFID tags are highly resource constrained, they are not able to carry out expensive cryptographic primitives to achieve strong authentication. This paper introduces a lightweight authentication protocol for low-cost RFID tags. Compared with previous work, our solution provides better traceability protection while keeping the system efficient in terms of computation and communication. Our scheme also maintains comparable strength regarding other security aspects.