A privacy and authentication protocol for mobile RFID system

Since information communication via radio transmission can be easily eavesdropped, therefore, many radio frequency identification (RFID) security mechanisms for location privacy protection have been proposed recently. However, most of previously proposed schemes do not conform to the EPC Class-1 GEN-2 standard for passive RFID tags as they require the implementation of hash functions on the tags. In 2013, Doss et al. proposed the mutual authentication for the tag, the reader, and the back-end server in the RFID system. Their scheme is the first quadratic residues based to achieve compliance to EPC Class-1 GEN-2 specification and the security of the server-reader channel may not be guaranteed. However, this article will show that the computational requirements and bandwidth consumption are quite demanding in Doss et al.'s scheme. To improve Doss et al.'s protocol, this article proposes a new efficient RFID system where both the tag-reader channel and the reader-server channel are insecure. The proposed method is not only satisfies all the security requirements for the reader and the tag but also achieve compliance to EPC Class-1 GEN-2 specifications. Moreover, the proposed scheme can be used in a large-scale RFID system.