Efficient authentication for low-cost RFID systems

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology is expected to play a critical role in identifying articles and serving the growing need to combat counterfeiting and fraud. However, the use of RFID tags may cause privacy violation of people holding an RFID tag. The main privacy concerns are information leakage of a tag, traceabiltiy of the person and impersonation of a tag. In this paper, we study authentication as a method to protect privacy, especially for low-cost RFID systems, which have much restrictions in limited computing power, low die-size, and low power requirements. Therefore, cost effective means of authentication is needed to deal with these problems effectively. We propose an authentication protocol, LCAP, which needs only two one-way hash function operations and hence is quite efficient. Leakage of information is prevented in the scheme since a tag emits its identifier only after authentication. By refreshing a identifier of a tag in each session, the scheme also provides a location privacy and can recover lost massages from many attacks such as spoofing attacks.