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 desynchronization attack and privacy analysis over these protocols.
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…
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…
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…
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…
In 2010, Grigoriev and Shpilrain, introduced some graph-based authentication schemes. We present a cryptanalysis of some of these protocols, and introduce some new schemes to fix the problems.
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…
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.
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 …
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.
Remote user authentication is desirable for a Telecare medicine information system (TMIS) to verify the correctness of remote users and server over the insecure channel. We propose an authentication scheme for TMIS.
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.
Remote user authentication is critical requirement in Telecare Medicine Information System (TMIS) to protect the patient personal details, security and integrity of the critical medical records of the patient as the patient data is transmitted over insecure public communication channel called Internet. In 2013, Yan proposed a biometric based remote user authentication scheme and claimed that his scheme is secure. Recently, Dheerendra et al. demonstrated some drawbacks in Yan et al scheme and proposed an improved scheme to erase the drawbacks of Yan et al scheme. We analyze Dheerendra et al sch…
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…
Song \cite{Song10} proposed very recently a password-based authentication and key establishment protocol using smart cards which attempts to solve some weaknesses found in a previous scheme suggested by Xu, Zhu, and Feng \cite{XZF09}. In this paper, we present attacks on the improved protocol, showing that it fails to achieve the claimed security goals.
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…
Dynamic ID-based remote user authentication schemes ensure efficient and anonymous mutual authentication between entities. In 2013, Khan et al. proposed an improved dynamic ID-based authentication scheme to overcome the security flaws of Wang et al.'s authentication scheme. Recently, Sun and Cao showed that Khan et al. does not satisfies the claim of the user's privacy and proposed an efficient authentication scheme with user anonymity. The Sun and Cao's scheme achieve improvement over Khan et al.'s scheme in both privacy and performance point of view. Unfortunately, we identify that Sun and C…
Telecare medical information systems (TMIS) aim to provide healthcare services remotely. Efficient and secure mechanism for authentication and key agreement is required in order to guarantee the security and privacy of patients in TMIS.
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 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 …
Remote user authentication is desirable for a Telecare medicine information system (TMIS) to verify the correctness of remote users. In 2013, Jiang et al. proposed privacy preserving authentication scheme for TMIS. Recently, Wu and Xu analyzed Jiang's scheme and identify serious security flaws in their scheme, namely, user impersonation attack, DoS attack and off-line password guessing attack. In this article, we analyze Wu and Xu's scheme and show that their scheme is also vulnerable to off-line password guessing attack and does not protect user anonymity. Moreover, we identify the inefficien…
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 …
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…
In this paper, we analyze four authentication protocols of Bindu et al., Goriparthi et al., Wang et al. and Hölbl et al.. After investigation, we reveal several weaknesses of these schemes. First, Bindu et al.'s protocol suffers from an insider impersonation attack if a malicious user obtains a lost smart card. Second, both Goriparthi et al.'s and Wang et al.'s protocols cannot withstand a DoS attack in the password change phase, i.e. an attacker can involve the phase to make user's password never be used in subsequent authentications. Third, Hölbl et al.'s protocol is vulnerable to an insider…
In 2005, Yang, Wang, and Chang proposed an improved timestamp-based password authentication scheme in an attempt to overcome the flaws of Yang-Shieh_s legendary timestamp-based remote authentication scheme using smart cards. After analyzing the improved scheme proposed by Yang-Wang-Chang, we have found that their scheme is still insecure and vulnerable to four types of forgery attacks. Hence, in this paper, we prove that, their claim that their scheme is intractable is incorrect. Also, we show that even an attack based on Sun et al._s attack could be launched against their scheme which they cl…
Telecare medical information systems are gaining rapid popularity in terms of providing the delivery of online health-related services such as online remote health profile access for patients and doctors. Due to being installed entirely on Internet, these systems are exposed to various security and privacy threats. Hence, establishing a secure key agreement and authentication process between the patients and the medical servers is an important challenge. Recently, Khatoon et.al proposed an ECC-based unlink-able authentication and key agreement method for healthcare related application in smart…
In this paper we present the first practical attack on the shifted conjugacy-based authentication protocol proposed by P. Dehornoy. We discuss the weaknesses of that primitive and propose ways to improve the protocol.
Recently, Li et al. proposed a secure biometric-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards to withstand the security flaws of Li-Hwang's efficient biometric-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards. Li et al.'s scheme is based on biometrics verification, smart card and one-way hash function, and it also uses the random nonce rather than a synchronized clock, and thus it is efficient in computational cost and more secure than Li-Hwang's scheme. Unfortunately, in this paper we show that Li et al.'s scheme still has some security weaknesses in their design. In orde…
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 (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…
In 2004, Das, Saxena and Gulati proposed a dynamic ID-based remote user authentication scheme which has many advantage such as no verifier table, user freedom to choose and change password and so on. However the subsequent papers have shown that this scheme is completely insecure and vulnerable to many attacks. Since then many schemes with improvements to Das et al's scheme has been proposed but each has its pros and cons. Recently Yan-yan Wang et al. have proposed a scheme to overcome security weaknesses of Das et al.'s scheme. However this scheme too is vulnerable to various security attacks…
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.
The smart card based authentication protocols try to ensure secure and authorized communication between remote entities. In 2012, Wei et al. presented an improvement of Wu et al.'s two-factor authentication scheme for TMIS which is proven vulnerable to off-line password guessing attack by Zhu. Zhu also proposed a modified scheme to overcome with weakness of Wei et al.'s scheme, although Lee and Liu showed the failure of his scheme to resist parallel session attacks. Moreover, Lee and Liu introduced an improved scheme. We analyze Wei et al.'s, Zhu's and Lee and Liu's schemes and identify that n…
Continuous authentication has been proposed as a complementary security mechanism to password-based authentication for computer devices that are handled directly by humans, such as smart phones. Continuous authentication has some privacy issues as certain user features and actions are revealed to the authentication server, which is not assumed to be trusted. Wei et al. proposed in 2021 a privacy-preserving protocol for behavioral authentication that utilizes homomorphic encryption. The encryption prevents the server from obtaining sampled user features. In this paper, we show that the Wei et a…
With the rapid advancement of wireless network technology, usage of WSN in real time applications like military, forest monitoring etc. found increasing. Generally WSN operate in an unattended environment and handles critical data. Authenticating the user trying to access the sensor memory is one of the critical requirements. Many researchers have proposed remote user authentication schemes focusing on various parameters. In 2013, Li et al. proposed a temporal-credential-based mutual authentication and key agreement scheme for WSNs. Li et al. claimed that their scheme is secure against all maj…
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…
The Telecare medicine information system (TMIS) is developed to provide Telecare services to the remote user. A user can access remote medical servers using internet without moving from his place. Although remote user and server exchange their messages/data via public networks. An adversary is considered to be enough powerful that he may have full control over the public network. This makes these Telecare services vulnerable to attacks. To ensure secure communication between the user and server many password based authentication schemes have been proposed. In 2013, Hao et al. presented chaotic…
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 …
Recently, Yan et al. proposed a quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol with authentication using single photons and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs (Yan et al., CMC-Computers, Materials \& Continua, 63(3), 2020). In this work, we show that the QSDC protocol is not secure against intercept-and-resend attack and impersonation attack. An eavesdropper can get the full secret message by applying these attacks. We propose a modification of this protocol, which defeats the above attacks along with all the familiar attacks.
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…
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 analyze the Sibert et al. group-based (Feige-Fiat-Shamir type) authentication protocol and show that the protocol is not computationally zero-knowledge. In addition, we provide experimental evidence that our approach is practical and can succeed even for groups with no efficiently computable length function such as braid groups. The novelty of this work is that we are not attacking the protocol by trying to solve an underlying complex algebraic problem, namely, the conjugacy search problem, but use a probabilistic approach, instead.
Advancement in communication technology provides a scalable platform for various services where a remote user can access the server from anywhere without moving from its place. It has provided a unique opportunity for online services, such that the user need not physically present at the service center. These services adopt authentication and key agreement protocols to ensure authorized and secure access to resources. Most of the authentication schemes support single server environment where the user has to register with each server. If a user wishes to access multiple application servers, he …
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…
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…
