Lightweight Anonymous RFID Group Ownership Transfer Protocol in Multi-owner Environment

In a RFID enabled system, tagged products is ordinarily required to be transferred from an owner to another, which makes the ownership of corresponding tags change for several times. To overcome problem of temporary ownership transfer, a lightweight anonymous group ownership transfer protocol is proposed in this paper. It involves ownership transfer and ownership recovery for group tags, which are all based upon mutual authentication. Compared with most of previous protocols using hash functions and cryptographic suites, our scheme only utilizes simple operations, which are completely compliant with EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard. Through our scheme, the window problem in multi-owner environment is first solved. Security analysis shows that our protocol can provide security and privacy preservation. It is also demonstrated that it resists various attacks. Performance comparisons indicate that our scheme can meet necessary security requirements and achieve better performance.