Time cost evaluation for executing RFID authentication protocols

There are various reader/tag authentication protocols proposed for the security of RFID systems. Such a protocol normally contains several rounds of conversations between a tag and a reader and involves cryptographic operations at both reader and tag sides. Currently there is a lack of benchmarks that provide a fair comparison platform for (a) the time cost of cryptographic operations at the tag side and (b) the time cost of data exchange between a reader and a tag, making it impossible to evaluate the total time cost for executing a protocol. Based on our experiments implemented on IAIK UHF tag emulators (known as DemoTags), in this paper we present detailed benchmarks of both time costs for RFID authentication protocols. Our results reveal that the data exchange dominates the time cost for running a protocol. We also give a classification for the existing protocols and summarise formulae of time cost evaluation for each type of protocols in a way so that a user can evaluate the time cost of a protocol amongst several choices of cryptographic operations in an application.