A comparative analysis of RFID authentication protocols for healthcare applications

Radio frequency identifications (RFID) are a special kind of wireless technology. They offer intelligent communication solutions for healthcare applications. The main component of RFID based healthcare systems are tags; they are resource-constrained devices with limited capabilities. Due to the critical nature of the data exchanged in RFID based healthcare systems, different security techniques are adopted. Among these techniques, authentication protocols are considered one of the most important. The literature lacks an authentication protocol that grants all the security requirements and protects against all the possible attacks, and for this reason, designing such a protocol captured the researcher's attention. The limitations of RFID systems must be taken into consideration while designing authentication protocols. This paper evaluates the security and performance of several recent RFID authentication protocols in healthcare applications. It also compares different security requirements and attacks in the studied protocols. Moreover, it outlines a comparison between the studied RFID authentication protocols in terms of computational time, required memory space, and communication cost.