An efficient and secure RFID authentication protocol using elliptic curve cryptography

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a relatively new technology widely deployed in many applications. Due to several advantages of the technology including decreased costs and increased speed, different organizations and industries show interest in it, and its application range is gradually developing. Some of the main problems of RFID are security and privacy. The implementation of authentication protocols is a flexible and effective way to solve these problems. Several authentication protocols of RFID are based on hash functions or symmetric cryptography. According to the small size of the key, efficient computations, and high security in the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), its use has increased. Recently some certain ECC-based authentication protocols have been represented. In this paper, a RFID authentication protocol is presented using ECC for mutual authentication to overcome weaknesses of the existing authentication protocols. It has been shown that the proposed protocol satisfies security requirements of RFID authentication protocol and prevents different attacks on RFID systems. Also, the proposed authentication protocol has been analyzed in terms of computational costs, communication costs, and storage requirements. The results revealed that the proposed authentication protocol is an appropriate model for RFID tags with limited resources.