An Improved IoT/RFID-Enabled Object Tracking and Authentication Scheme for Smart Logistics

Smart logistics play a crucial role for rapid industrialization and economic development of the countries. It not only assists in delivering the low cost services to the subscribers but also helps in bringing transparency in the supply chain management system with the creation of interactive ecosystem encompassing IoT, RFID and sensor-based objects. The realization of the concept of smart logistics includes the real-time communication and object tracking through 5G-oriented Internet of Things (IoT) and Information Communication Technology (ICT)-based smart devices. However, only technological advances are not enough until all intermediaries in the process of supply chain are reliable. Besides, the smart devices exchanging data are deficient in power and require energy friendly communication protocols. This requires the underlying protocols responsible for authenticating the entities in supply chain, to be secure as well as efficient. Recently, a few lightweight authentication protocols for object tracking and logistics including Anandhi et al. (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-018-6033-6) have been presented. We ascertain that these schemes lack mutual authenticity and resistance to other forgery attacks. Considering the limitations in Anandhi et al. and other recently presented logistics and supply chain-based authenticated key agreements, we propose a new 5G enabled secure RFID authentication scheme for smart logistics. We analyze and validate the contributed model using formal security analysis based on random oracle model. The proposed scheme supports 19% more security features in comparison with other contemporary schemes. The performance evaluation results demonstrate promising findings for this scheme as compared to other studies.