Consideration on the brute-force attack cost and retrieval cost: A hash-based radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag mutual authentication protocol

Abstract

A radio-frequency identification (RFID) system is a promising automatic identification technology that uses communication via radio waves to identify and track moving objects. RFID systems are expected to replace bar-code systems in object identification fields in the future, but various security problems are obstructing their diffusion. The most important problem of RFID system is that an attacker can access the tag information, which raises privacy infringement and forgery problems. This paper proposes a hash-based RFID tag mutual authentication protocol to solve these security problems of RFID systems. The proposed protocol is designed to demand high cost of acquiring the tag information for attackers. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.