A Lightweight Path Authentication Protocol for RFID-Based Supply Chains

Due to the ability for real-time tracking and tracing of products and components, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has an important role in supply chain man-agement. However, the limited memory of tags and their lack of computing capability complicate the challenge of designing an efficient and secure tag path authentication protocol for an RFID-based supply chain. Recently in 2016, Wang et al. [1] proposed an efficient path authentication protocol with reduced requirements on the tag memory. Specifically, for a single tag, it is 800 bits instead of 960 bits in the tag path authentication protocol "Tracker" [2]). In this paper, we propose a new tag path authentication protocol for RFID-based supply chains, which further reduces the memory space from 800 bits to 640 bits. At the same time, the new protocol reduces the computation cost required at each reader and removes the strong assumption that the manager in the system needs to store all readers' private keys in Wang et al.'s protocol and the "Tracker".