Analysis of Xiao et al.'s authentication protocol conforming to EPC C1 G2 standard

Recently, different RFID authentication protocols conforming to EPC Class 1 Generation 2 (EPC C1 G2) standard have been proposed. In 2013, Xiao et al. have proposed an improved mutual authentication protocol which claimed to eliminate the weaknesses of Yoon's protocol that has been proposed in 2012. In this paper, we study the security and the privacy of Xiao et al.'s protocol. It is shown that their protocol suffers from secret parameters reveal, tag impersonation attack, backward and forward traceability attacks. Then, in order to enhance the security and the privacy of this protocol, a modified version is proposed. In order to evaluate our proposed protocol, its security and privacy are analyzed. Furthermore, the proposed protocol is compared with some similar protocols in the terms of security and privacy. It is shown that the proposed protocol is secure against various attacks and also provides user privacy.