Mutual authentication protocol for low cost passive tag in RFID system

Internet of things (IoT) contains a massive number of “things” that are connected to the internet and communicates without human interaction. In these IoT devices, Radio frequency identification is used to detect the location of devices in communication networks. However, the RFID tag contains a low power battery and low memory capacity (i.e., few KB). Hence, it requires a lightweight or ultra-lightweight solutions for these RFID tags. This paper proposes a novel ultra-lightweight authenticate approach for a passive tag that uses XOR and rotate operations. This scheme contains three different phases: tag identification, mutual authentication, and pseudonyms and key updating phases. The first phase comprises the identification of the tag. After that, the second phase performs mutual authentication between the tag and the reader. The last phase involves the updating of the key between the tag and the reader. This scheme also defines the function “MIX” to enhance the security of the protocol. This scheme analyses in terms of communication cost between tag and reader, and storage cost for a passive tag. © 2021, Bharati Vidyapeeth's Institute of Computer Applications and Management.