Efficient Mobile RFID Authentication Protocol for Smart Logistics Targets Tracking

Target tracking is one of the problems existing in the supply chain management. The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) in target tracking helps improve the monitoring accuracy and status visibility of the tracked target. For mobile RFID system, its three entities have to authenticate each other’s identity in order to guarantee the data transmission security. The mobile RFID authentication protocol cannot achieve both high security and low complexity at the same time. For this problem, a new efficiency mobile RFID authentication protocol is proposed in this paper, which implements secure authentication among different communication entities by different operation modes. For example, the protocol adopts Hash Function between reader and cloud server, and exchange-cross bitwise operation between tag and cloud server, to achieve low computing cost at tag-end while improving the security of mobile communication data. At the cloud server end, the protocol proposed in this paper adopts index data table as the storage mode, which further improves the could server efficiency in retrieving the authentication of tags and readers, and reduces the risks of sensitive data disclosure. According to the security analysis, this protocol can resist impersonation attack, replay attack, trace attack and other attacks launched by attackers. Its security performance is further proved by BAN logic, proverif tool and random oracle model. On the other hand, the simple operation at the tag-end of the protocol lowers the tag cost to a larger extent.