Efficient Integrity Authentication Scheme for Large-Scale RFID Systems

Major manufacturers and retailers are increasingly using RFID systems in supply-chain scenarios, where theft of goods during transport typically causes significant economic losses. This paper studies how to achieve time-efficient and secure integrity authentication solutions for RFID systems. We start with a straightforward solution called SecAuth, which uses a secure identity stored on reserved memory to securely authenticate the tags. We then propose a time efficient KTAuth protocol, which designs a verification chain mechanism to efficiently authenticate a large set of tags based on a small set of pre-defined key tags. We point out that the limitation of KTAuth is that it takes too much overhead to write a large block of data to tag memory, which leads to the proposed group selection mechanism. The KTAuth with group selection (KTAuth-GS) could select key tags with a single select command, which helps to quickly identify the key tags and reduces the data writes on them. Experiments and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed KTAuth-GS can defend against counterfeiting attacks by providing more reliable results and reducing the execution time by as much as a factor of 5 when compared with a baseline tag identification protocol.