Security and privacy are the inherent problems in RFID communications. There are several protocols have been proposed to overcome those problems. Hash chain is commonly employed by the protocols to improve security and privacy for RFID authentication. Although the protocols able to provide specific solution for RFID security and privacy problems, they fail to provide integrated solution. This article is a survey to closely observe those protocols in terms of its focus and limitations.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and biometric technologies saw fast evolutions during the last years and which are used in several applications, such as access control. Among important characteristics in the RFID tags, we mention the limitation of resources (memory, energy, ...). Our work focuses on the design of a RFID authentication protocol which uses biometric data and which confirms the secrecy, the authentication and the privacy. Our protocol requires a PRNG (Pseud-Random Number Generator), a robust hash function and Biometric hash function. The Biometric hash function is used to o…
This paper address a new problem in RFID authentication research for the first time. That is, existing RFID authentication schemes generally assume that the backend server is absolutely secure, however, this assumption is rarely tenable in practical conditions. It disables existing RFID authentication protocols from being safely applied to a reallife scenario in which the backend server is actually vulnerable, compromised or even malicious itself. We propose an RFID authentication scheme against an unsecure backend server. It is based on hash chain, searching over encrypted data, and coprivacy…
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key technology used in many applications. In the past decades, plenty of secure and privacy-preserving RFID tag/mutual authentication protocols as well as formal frameworks for evaluating them have been proposed. However, we notice that a property, namely proof of possession (PoP), has not been rigorously studied till now, despite it has significant value in many RFID applications. For example, in RFID-enabled supply chains, PoP helps prevent dis-honest parties from publishing information about products/tags that they actually have never processed. We…
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology one of the most promising technologies in the field of ubiquitous computing. Indeed, RFID technology may well replace barcode technology. Although it offers many advantages over other identification systems, there are also associated security risks that are not easy to be addressed. When designing a real lightweight authentication protocol for low cost RFID tags, a number of challenges arise due to the extremely limited computational, storage and communication abilities of Low-cost RFID tags. This paper proposes a real mutual authentication prot…
This paper presents a survey on several RFID authentication protocols under low cost restrictions. Low cost RFID are mainly addressed with limited security and privacy protections. In this study, we explore several protocols with various authentication mechanisms found in literature that satisfy low cost restrictions. Assessments of these protocols are based on data protection, tracking protection, forward security. Finally, it is concluded that no single low cost RFID protocol fully meets the requirement of the given assessments. While a protocol satisfies one or two assessments, it fails to …
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is appearing as a favorite technology for automated identification, which can be widely applied to many applications such as e-passport, supply chain management and ticketing. However, researchers have found many security and privacy problems along RFID technology. In recent years, many researchers are interested in RFID authentication protocols and their security flaws. In this paper, we analyze two of the newest RFID authentication protocols which proposed by Fu et al. and Li et al. from several security viewpoints. We present different attacks such as d…
Security and Privacy concerns in Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology particularly RFID Card, is a wide research area which have attracted researchers for over a decade. Authenticating users at the Card end of the RFID technology constitutes one of the major sources of attacks on the system. In this research, we studied the various known attacks and mitigation available. We proposed a conceptual framework that that can be used to mitigate the unauthorized use of RFID Card. This concept will mitigate the single point of the RFID card failure: unauthorized use.
Along with the development of internet of things and pervasive computing, researchers are increasingly focusing on server-less RFID authentication and searching protocols, which utilize mobile RFID readers. However, revealing privacy of mobile reader holders is a widely neglected problem in current research. This paper concentrates on preserving privacy of mobile reader holders in server-less RFID authentication and searching protocols. We propose a detailed requirement as a principle for future protocol designs, and a scheme to enhance most current protocols. We apply our scheme to two classi…
Vajda and Buttyan (VB) proposed a set of five lightweight RFID authentication protocols. Defend, Fu, and Juels (DFJ) did cryptanalysis on two of them - XOR and SUBSET. To the XOR protocol, DFJ proposed repeated keys attack and nibble attack. In this paper, we identify the vulnerability existed in the original VB's successive session key permutation algorithm. We propose three enhancements to prevent DFJ's attacks and make XOR protocol stronger without introducing extra resource cost.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology that employs basic identifier of an object embedded in a chip, transmitted via radio wave, for identification. An RFID Card responds to query or interrogation irrespective of "Who" holds the Card; like a key to a door. Since an attacker can possess the card, access to such object can therefore be easily compromised. This security breach is classified as an unauthorized use of Card, and it forms the bedrock for RFID Card compromise especially in access control. As an on-card authentication mechanism, this research proposed a concept termed B…
Continuous advances of Information Technologies (ITs), and in particular of the RFID technologies that allow the connection between the physical world objects and the IT infrastructure, have guaranteed the improvement and efficiency of industrial technologies in the last decades. This paper includes the proposal of two new schemes for RFID. On the one hand, it describes the internals of a lightweight Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) suitable for low resource devices such as passive RFID complying with the EPC Gen2 specifications. On the other hand, a new secure mutual authentication proto…
Widespread attention is recently paid upon RFID system structure considering its ease of deployment over an extensive range of applications. Due to its several advantages, many technical articles are published to improve its capabilities over specific system implementations. Recently, a lightweight anti-de-synchronization RFID authentication protocol and a lightweight binding proof protocol to guard patient safety are proposed. This contribution provides enough evidence to prove the first introduced protocol vulnerability to de-synchronization attack. It also provides the other protocol's suff…
Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the emerging technologies that enable the connection and transfer of information through communication networks. The main idea of the IoT is the widespread presence of objects such as mobile devices, sensors, and RFID. With the increase in traffic volume in urban areas, the existing intelligent urban traffic management system based on IoT can be vital. Therefore, this paper focused on security in urban traffic based on using RFID. In our scheme, RFID tags chose as the purpose of this article. We, in this paper, present a mutual authentication proto…
Recently, Alomair et al. proposed the first UnConditionally Secure mutual authentication protocol for low-cost RFID systems(UCS-RFID). The security of the UCS-RFID relies on five dynamic secret keys which are updated at every protocol run using a fresh random number (nonce) secretly transmitted from a reader to tags. Our results show that, at the highest security level of the protocol (security parameter= 256), inferring a nonce is feasible with the probability of 0.99 by eavesdropping(observing) about 90 runs of the protocol. Finding a nonce enable a passive attacker to recover all five secre…
Security in passive resource-constrained Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags is of much interest nowadays. Resistance against illegal tracking, cloning, timing, and replay attacks are necessary for a secure RFID authentication scheme. Reader authentication is also necessary to thwart any illegal attempt to read the tags. With an objective to design a secure and low-cost RFID authentication protocol, Gene Tsudik proposed a timestamp-based protocol using symmetric keys, named YA-TRAP*. Although YA-TRAP* achieves its target security properties, it is susceptible to timing attacks, where th…
In recent years, radio frequency identification technology has moved into the mainstream applications that help to speed up handling of manufactured goods and materials. RFID tags are divided into two classes: active and passive. Active tag requires a power source that's why its cost is more than passive tags. However, the low-cost RFID tags are facing new challenges to security and privacy. Some solutions utilize expensive cryptographic primitives such as hash or encryption functions, and some lightweight approaches have been reported to be not secure. This paper describes a lightweight Mutua…
In this work we present the first passive attack over the SASI lightweight authentication protocol with modular rotations. This can be used to fully recover the secret $ID$ of the RFID tag, which is the value the protocol is designed to conceal. The attack is described initially for recovering $\lfloor log_2(96) \rfloor=6$ bits of the secret value $ID$, a result that by itself allows to mount traceability attacks on any given tag. However, the proposed scheme can be extended to obtain any amount of bits of the secret $ID$, provided a sufficiently large number of successful consecutive sessions…
In this paper, we propose an HB-like protocol for privacy-preserving authentication of RFID tags, whereby a tag can remain anonymous and untraceable to an adversary during the authentication process. Previous proposals of such protocols were based on PRF computations. Our protocol can instead be used on low-cost tags that may be incapable of computing standard PRFs. Moreover, since the underlying computations in HB protocols are very efficient, our protocol also reduces reader load compared to PRF-based protocols. We suggest a tree-based approach that replaces the PRF-based authentication from…
In this paper, we analyze the security of an RFID authentication protocol proposed by Liu and Bailey [1], called Privacy and Authentication Protocol (PAP), and show its vulnerabilities and faulty assumptions. PAP is a privacy and authentication protocol designed for passive tags. The authors claim that the protocol, being resistant to commonly assumed attacks, requires little computation and provides privacy protection and authentication. Nevertheless, we propose two traceability attacks and an impersonation attack, in which the revealing of secret information (i.e., secret key and static iden…
Privacy preserving RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) authentication has been an active research area in recent years. Both forward security and backward security are required to maintain the privacy of a tag, i.e., exposure of a tag's secret key should not reveal the past or future secret keys of the tag. We envisage the need for a formal model for backward security for RFID protocol designs in shared key settings, since the RFID tags are too resource-constrained to support public key settings. However, there has not been much research on backward security for shared key environment since …
Yeh et al. recently have proposed a mutual authentication protocol based on EPC Class-1 Gen.-2 standard [1]. They have claimed that their protocol is secure against adversarial attacks and also provides forward secrecy. In this paper we will show that the proposed protocol does not have proper security features. A powerful and practical attack is presented on this protocol whereby the whole security of the protocol is broken. Furthermore, Yeh et al. protocol does not assure the untraceabilitiy and backward untraceabilitiy aspects. Namely, all past and next transactions of a compromised tag wil…
Relay attacks are a major concern for RFID systems: during an authentication process an adversary transparently relays messages between a verifier and a remote legitimate prover. We present an authentication protocol suited for RFID systems. Our solution is the first that prevents relay attacks without degrading the authentication security level: it minimizes the probability that the verifier accepts a fake proof of identity, whether or not a relay attack occurs.
Widespread deployment of RFID system arises security and privacy concerns of users. There are several proposals are in the literature to avoid these concerns, but most of them provides reasonable privacy at the cost of search complexity on the server side. The search complexity increases linearly with the number of tags in the system. Some schemes use a group based approach to solve the search complexity problem. In this paper, we proposed a group based authentication protocol for RFID system which is based on some characteristics of cyclic groups. The scheme uses only bitwise XOR and mod oper…
RFID tags are heavily constrained in computational and storage capabilities, and raise numerous privacy concerns in everyday life due to their vulnerability to different attacks. Both forward security and backward security are required to maintain the privacy of a tag i.e., exposure of a tag's secret key should not reveal the past or future secret keys of the tag. We envisage the need for a formal model for backward security for RFID protocol designs in shared key settings, since the RFID tags are too resource-constrained to support public key settings. However, there has not been much researc…
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a modern communication technology, which provides authentication and identification through a nonphysical contact. Recently, the use of this technology is almost developed in healthcare environments. Although RFID technology can prepare sagacity in systems, privacy and security issues ought to be considered before. Recently, in 2015, Li et al. proposed SRTA, a hash-based RFID authentication protocol in medication verification for healthcare. In this paper, we study this protocol and show that SRTA protocol is vulnerable to traceability, impersonation an…
We consider repeated communication sessions between a RFID Tag (e.g., Radio Frequency Identification, RFID Tag) and a RFID Verifier. A proactive information theoretic security scheme is proposed. The scheme is based on the assumption that the information exchanged during at least one of every n successive communication sessions is not exposed to an adversary. The Tag and the Verifier maintain a vector of n entries that is repeatedly refreshed by pairwise xoring entries, with a new vector of n entries that is randomly chosen by the Tag and sent to the Verifier as a part of each communication se…
Almost all existing RFID authentication schemes (tag/reader) are vulnerable to relay attacks, because of their inability to estimate the distance to the tag. These attacks are very serious since it can be mounted without the notice of neither the reader nor the tag and cannot be prevented by cryptographic protocols that operate at the application layer. Distance bounding protocols represent a promising way to thwart relay attacks, by measuring the round trip time of short authenticated messages. All the existing distance bounding protocols use random number generator and hash functions at the …
Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is a pioneer technology which has depicted a new lifestyle for humanity in all around the world. Every day we observe an increase in the scope of RFID applications and no one cannot withdraw its numerous usage around him/herself. An important issue which should be considered is providing privacy and security requirements of an RFID system. Recently in 2014, Cai et al. proposed two improved RFID authentication protocols based on R-RAPS rules by the names of IHRMA and I2SRS. In this paper, we investigate the privacy of the aforementioned protocols based on O…
We set up a framework for the formal proofs of RFID protocols in the computational model. We rely on the so-called computationally complete symbolic attacker model. Our contributions are: i) To design (and prove sound) axioms reflecting the properties of hash functions (Collision-Resistance, PRF); ii) To formalize computational unlinkability in the model; iii) To illustrate the method, providing the first formal proofs of unlinkability of RFID protocols, in the computational model.
Many different approaches for neural network based hash functions have been proposed. Statistical analysis must correlate security of them. This paper proposes novel neural hashing approach for gray scale image authentication. The suggested system is rapid, robust, useful and secure. Proposed hash function generates hash values using neural network one-way property and non-linear techniques. As a result security and performance analysis are performed and satisfying results are achieved. These features are dominant reasons for preferring against traditional ones.
RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is a powerful technology that, due to its numerous advantages, is supposed to replace the various identification systems such as barcodes or magnetic stripes in a short time. There are three devices involved in an RFID protocol: a Reader, a Tag, and a back-end Database. One of the key factors for the RFID technology is that, in order to be used on large scale, the price of the Tags has to be cheap: it cannot be expensive because who is supposed to use it would need a great amount of them, furthermore, Tags must have very small dimensions. The low-cost natu…
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems are among the most widespread computing technologies with technical potential and profitable opportunities in numerous applications worldwide. Further, RFID is the core technology behind the Internet of Things (IoT), which can accomplish the real-time transmission of information between objects without manual operation. However, RFID security has been taken for granted for several years, causing multiple vulnerabilities that can even damage human functionalities. The latest ISO/IEC 18000-63:2015 standard concerning RFID dates to 2015, and much free…
Hash-based message authentication codes are an extremely simple yet hugely effective construction for producing keyed message digests using shared secrets. HMACs have seen widespread use as ad-hoc digital signatures in many Internet applications. While messages signed with an HMAC are secure against sender impersonation and tampering in transit, if used alone they are susceptible to replay attacks. We propose a construction that extends HMACs to produce a keyed message digest that has a finite validity period. We then propose a message signature scheme that uses this time-dependent MAC along w…
With the development of artificial intelligence and self-driving, vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) has become an irreplaceable part of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). However, the traditional network of the ground cannot meet the requirements of transmission, processing, and storage among vehicles. Under this circumstance, integrating space and air nodes into the whole network can provide comprehensive traffic information and reduce the transmission delay. The high mobility and low latency in the Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network (SAGIN) put forward higher requirements for sec…
Proper privacy protection in RFID systems is important. However, many of the schemes known are impractical, either because they use hash functions instead of the more hardware efficient symmetric encryption schemes as a efficient cryptographic primitive, or because they incur a rather costly key search time penalty at the reader. Moreover, they do not allow for dynamic, fine-grained access control to the tag that cater for more complex usage scenarios. In this paper we investigate such scenarios, and propose a model and corresponding privacy friendly protocols for efficient and fine-grained ma…
In this paper, the privacy of two recent RFID tag ownership transfer protocols are investigated against the tag owners as adversaries. The first protocol called ROTIV is a scheme which provides a privacy-preserving ownership transfer by using an HMAC-based authentication with public key encryption. However, our passive attack on this protocol shows that any legitimate owner which has been the owner of a specific tag is able to trace it either in the past or in the future. Tracing the tag is also possible via an active attack for any adversary who is able to tamper the tag and extract its infor…
An adversary who has obtained the cryptographic hash of a user's password can mount an offline attack to crack the password by comparing this hash value with the cryptographic hashes of likely password guesses. This offline attacker is limited only by the resources he is willing to invest to crack the password. Key-stretching tools can help mitigate the threat of offline attacks by making each password guess more expensive for the adversary to verify. However, key-stretching increases authentication costs for a legitimate authentication server. We introduce a novel Stackelberg game model which…
Time-based one-time password (TOTP) systems in use today require storing secrets on both the client and the server. As a result, an attack on the server can expose all second factors for all users in the system. We present T/Key, a time-based one-time password system that requires no secrets on the server. Our work modernizes the classic S/Key system and addresses the challenges in making such a system secure and practical. At the heart of our construction is a new lower bound analyzing the hardness of inverting hash chains composed of independent random functions, which formalizes the securit…
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) connected in the form of Internet of Things (IoT) are vulnerable to various security threats, due to the infrastructure-less deployment of IoT devices. Device-to-Device (D2D) authentication of these networks ensures the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of information in the deployed area. The literature suggests different approaches to address security issues in CPS technologies. However, they are mostly based on centralized techniques or specific system deployments with higher cost of computation and communication. It is therefore necessary to develop …
This paper presents a comprehensive survey of existing authentication and privacy-preserving schemes for 4G and 5G cellular networks. We start by providing an overview of existing surveys that deal with 4G and 5G communications, applications, standardization, and security. Then, we give a classification of threat models in 4G and 5G cellular networks in four categories, including, attacks against privacy, attacks against integrity, attacks against availability, and attacks against authentication. We also provide a classification of countermeasures into three types of categories, including, cry…
This work considers identity attack on a radio-frequency identification (RFID)-based backscatter communication system. Specifically, we consider a single-reader, single-tag RFID system whereby the reader and the tag undergo two-way signaling which enables the reader to extract the tag ID in order to authenticate the legitimate tag (L-tag). We then consider a scenario whereby a malicious tag (M-tag)---having the same ID as the L-tag programmed in its memory by a wizard---attempts to deceive the reader by pretending to be the L-tag. To this end, we counter the identity attack by exploiting the n…
The aim of integrity protection process is not only to secure the send message, but also ensures that the original message is not modified during sending the message. In this paper, a novel proposed model is proposed to verify that the sent message was not modified. The proposed model starting with encrypting the original message and applying one of the hash functions on the message. The ciphered message, private key, and the output of hash function was reshaped to apply Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Zig-zag ordering, and Huffman coding to obtain a compressed text, this compressed text is t…
In this paper, we consider the problem of verifying anonymity and unlinkability in the symbolic model, where protocols are represented as processes in a variant of the applied pi calculus, notably used in the ProVerif tool. Existing tools and techniques do not allow to verify directly these properties, expressed as behavioral equivalences. We propose a different approach: we design two conditions on protocols which are sufficient to ensure anonymity and unlinkability, and which can then be effectively checked automatically using ProVerif. Our two conditions correspond to two broad classes of a…
The vast majority of RFID authentication protocols assume the proximity between readers and tags due to the limited range of the radio channel. However, in real scenarios an intruder can be located between the prover (tag) and the verifier (reader) and trick this last one into thinking that the prover is in close proximity. This attack is generally known as a relay attack in which scope distance fraud, mafia fraud and terrorist attacks are included. Distance bounding protocols represent a promising countermeasure to hinder relay attacks. Several protocols have been proposed during the last yea…
Telecare medicine information systems (TMIS) present the platform to deliver clinical service door to door. The technological advances in mobile computing are enhancing the quality of healthcare and a user can access these services using its mobile device. Existing authentication schemes for TMIS are either vulnerable to attacks or they have higher computational cost. We propose a biometric based efficient authentication scheme for TMIS which only requires the computation of the hash and XOR functions.
Traditional text-based password schemes are inherently weak. Users tend to choose passwords that are easy to remember, making them susceptible to various attacks that have matured over the years. ObPwd [5] has tried to address these issues by converting user-selected digital objects to high-entropy text passwords for user authentication. In this paper, we extend the ObPwd scheme with a new object based password scheme that performs majority of the computation at the server side. This paper essentially discusses two frameworks for object password schemes, an object hash-based scheme (where the …
In this paper, we present two practical ARQ-Based security schemes for Wi-Fi and RFID networks. Our proposed schemes enhance the confidentiality and authenticity functions of these networks, respectively. Both schemes build on the same idea; by exploiting the statistical independence between the multipath fading experienced by the legitimate nodes and potential adversaries, secret keys are established and then are continuously updated. The continuous key update property of both schemes makes them capable of defending against all of the passive eavesdropping attacks and most of the currently-kn…
By expanding the connection of objects to the Internet and their entry to human life, the issue of security and privacy has become important. In order to enhance security and privacy on the Internet, many security protocols have been developed. Unfortunately, the security analyzes that have been carried out on these protocols show that they are vulnerable to one or few attacks, which eliminates the use of these protocols. Therefore, the need for a security protocol on the Internet of Things (IoT) has not yet been resolved. Recently, Khor and Sidorov cryptanalyzed the Wang et al. protocol and p…
Due to hostile environment and wireless communication channel, security mechanisms are essential for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Existence of a pair of shared key is a prerequisite for many of these security mechanisms; a task that key management system addresses. Recently, an energy efficient method based on public key cryptography (PKC) was proposed. We analyze this protocol and show that it is vulnerable to denial of service (DOS) attacks and adversary can exhaust memory and battery of nodes. Then, we analyze this protocol and show that using a more knowledgeable BS this vulnerability …
In the distributed environment, authentication and key exchange mechanisms play a major role. In general, for authentication, the client and the server mutually exchange a common cryptographic key. In earlier, passwords were stored on a single server. If an intruder gains access to the server by using some malicious attacks, then all the passwords stored in the database be compromised. So the e-commerce application security is endangered. In order to improve the efficiency and performance of the authentication scheme, we introduce multiple servers to store the passwords and participate in the …
Recent years have witnessed the bloom development of the human-centered wireless sensing applications, in which some human information, such as the user's identity and motions, can be retrieved through analyzing the signal distortion caused by the target person. However, the openness of wireless transmission raises increasing concerns on user privacy, since either the human identity or human motion is sensitive in certain scenarios, including personal residence, laboratory, and office. Researchers have reported that commodity WiFi signals can be abused to identify users. To dispel this threat,…
Smart card based authentication schemes are used in various fields like e-banking, e-commerce, wireless sensor networks, medical system and so on to authenticate the both remote user and the application server during the communication via internet. Recently, Karuppiah and Saravanan proposed an authentication scheme which is based on password and one-way cryptographic hash function. They have used a secure identity mechanism i.e., users' and server's identity are not public. Thus, the user and the server do not send their identity directly to each other during communications. In this paper, we …
Universal hashing, discovered by Carter and Wegman in 1979, has many important applications in computer science. MMH$^*$, which was shown to be $Δ$-universal by Halevi and Krawczyk in 1997, is a well-known universal hash function family. We introduce a variant of MMH$^*$, that we call GRDH, where we use an arbitrary integer $n>1$ instead of prime $p$ and let the keys $\mathbf{x}=\langle x_1, \ldots, x_k \rangle \in \mathbb{Z}_n^k$ satisfy the conditions $\gcd(x_i,n)=t_i$ ($1\leq i\leq k$), where $t_1,\ldots,t_k$ are given positive divisors of $n$. Then via connecting the universal hashing prob…
This paper proposes a new privacy-enhancing, context-aware user authentication system, ConSec, which uses a transformation of general location-sensitive data, such as GPS location, barometric altitude and noise levels, collected from the user's device, into a representation based on locality-sensitive hashing (LSH). The resulting hashes provide a dimensionality reduction of the underlying data, which we leverage to model users' behaviour for authentication using machine learning. We present how ConSec supports learning from categorical and numerical data, while addressing a number of on-device…
