Attacks and improvements to an RIFD mutual authentication protocol and its extensions

ABSTRACT

In WiSec'08, Song and Mitchell proposed an RFID mutual authentication protocol. Song also extended this protocol for RFID tag ownership transfer. These two protocols are designed to have the most security properties in the literature. We discover that, however, the mutual authentication protocol is vulnerable to both tag impersonation attack and reader impersonation attack, which enable an adversary to impersonate any legitimate reader or tag. We also discover that the ownership transfer protocol is vulnerable to a de-synchronization attack, which prevents a legitimate reader from authenticating a legitimate tag, and vice versa. We analyze the vulnerabilities of these protocols and propose our revisions to eliminate the vulnerabilities with comparable storage and computational requirements.

REFERENCES

• 1: Dakshi Agrawal , Bruce Archambeault , Josyula R. Rao , Pankaj Rohatgi, The EM Side-Channel(s), Revised Papers from the 4th International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, p.29-45, August 13-15, 2002
• 2: G. Avoine. Cryptography in radio frequency identification and fair exchange protocols. PhD thesis, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2005.
• 3: G. Avoine, E. Dysli, and P. Oechslin. Reducing time complexity in RFID systems. In Selected Areas in Cryptography, pages 291--306, 2005.
• 4: Hung-Yu Chien , Che-Hao Chen, Mutual authentication protocol for RFID conforming to EPC Class 1 Generation 2 standards, Computer Standards & Interfaces, v.29 n.2, p.254-259, February, 2007 [doi>10.1016/j.csi.2006.04.004]
• 5: Tassos Dimitriou, A Lightweight RFID Protocol to protect against Traceability and Cloning attacks, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Security and Privacy for Emerging Areas in Communications Networks, p.59-66, September 05-09, 2005 [doi>10.1109/SECURECOMM.2005.4]
• 6: Danny Dolev , Andrew C. Yao, On the security of public key protocols, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1981
• 7: D. N. Duc, J. Park, H. Lee, and K. Kim. Enhancing security of epcglobal gen-2 RFID tag against traceability and cloning. In SCIS, 2006.
• 8: S. Fouladgar and H. Afifi. An efficient delegation and transfer of ownership protocol for RFID tags. In First International EURASIP Workshop on RFID Technology, 2007.
• 9: S. Fouladgar and H. Afifi. A simple privacy protecting scheme enabling delegation and ownership transfer for RFID tags. JCM, 2(6):6{13, 2007.
• 10: Dirk Henrici , Paul Müller, Hash-based Enhancement of Location Privacy for Radio-Frequency Identification Devices using Varying Identifiers, Proceedings of the Second IEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, p.149, March 14-17, 2004
• 11: A. Juels and S. Weis. Defining Strong Privacy for RFID. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2006/137, 2006.
• 12: Yingjiu Li , Xuhua Ding, Protecting RFID communications in supply chains, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM symposium on Information, computer and communications security, March 20-22, 2007, Singapore [doi>10.1145/1229285.1229318]
• 13: C. H. Lim and T. Kwon. Strong and robust RFID authentication enabling perfect ownership transfer. In ICICS, pages 1--20, 2006.
• 14: D. Molnar, A. Soppera, and D. Wagner. A scalable, delegatable pseudonym protocol enabling ownership transfer of RFID tags. In Selected Areas in Cryptography, pages 276--290, 2005.
• 15: David Molnar , David Wagner, Privacy and security in library RFID: issues, practices, and architectures, Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, October 25-29, 2004, Washington DC, USA [doi>10.1145/1030083.1030112]
• 16: M. Ohkubo, K. Suzuki, and S. Kinoshita. Cryptographic approach to "privacy-friendly" tags. InRFID Privacy Workshop, MIT, 2003.
• 17: K. Osaka, T. Takagi, K. Yamazaki, and O. Takahashi. An efficient and secure RFID security method with ownership transfer. In CIS, pages 778--787, 2006.
• 18: J. Saito, K. Imamoto, and K. Sakurai. Reassignment scheme of an RFID tag's key for owner transfer. In EUC Workshops, pages 1303--1312, 2005.
• 19: B. Song. RFID Tag Ownership Transfer. In 4th Workshop on RFID Security (RFIDsec 08), Budaperst, Hungary, July 2008.
• 20: Boyeon Song , Chris J. Mitchell, RFID authentication protocol for low-cost tags, Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Wireless network security, March 31-April 02, 2008, Alexandria, VA, USA [doi>10.1145/1352533.1352556]
• 21: T. van Deursen and S. Radomirovic. Attacks on RFID protocols. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2008/310, 2008.
• 22: S. A. Weis, S. E. Sarma, R. L. Rivest, and D. W. Engels. Security and privacy aspects of low-cost radio frequency identification systems. In SPC, pages 201--212, 2003.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.5 Security and Protection (D.4.6, K.4.2)
          Subjects: Authentication

General Terms:
Design, Security

Keywords:
authentication, privacy, rfid, security