Securing IoT Enabled RFID Based Object Tracking Systems: A Symmetric Cryptography Based Authentication Protocol for Efficient Smart Object Tracking

Supply chain management systems (SCM) are the most intensive and statistical RFID application for object tracking. A lot of research has been carried out to overcome security issues in the field of online/offline object tracking as well as authentication protocols involving RFID technology. Due to advancements with the Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded systems in object tracking schemes the latest research manages to deliver information about the object’s location as well as provide particulars about the state of an object. Recent research presented a proposal for an authentication and online object tracking protocol focusing on solutions for privacy issues for device identification, end-to-end authentication, and secure online object tracking. However, recent schemes have been found to be vulnerable to traceability attacks. This paper presents an enhanced end-to-end authentication scheme where the identity of the user is kept anonymous so that its actions can not be tracked, eliminating attacks related to traceability. The security of the proposed protocol is formally analyzed using the attack model of the automated security testing tool, ProVerif. The proposed scheme outperforms competing schemes based on security.