Journal of Computer Security

In this paper, we explore a new direction towards solving the identity authentication problem in RFID systems. We break the RFID authentication process into two main problems: message authentication and random number generation. For parties equipped with a good source of randomness and a secure cryptographic primitive to authenticate messages, the literature of cryptography is rich with well-studied solutions for secure identity authentication. However, the two operations, random number generation and message authentication, can be expensive for low-cost RFID tags. In this paper, we lay down the foundations of a new direction towards solving these problems in RFID systems. We propose an unconditionally secure direction for authenticating RFID systems. We use the fact that RFID readers are computationally powerful devices to design a protocol that allows RFID readers to deliver random numbers to RFID tags in an unconditionally secure manner. Then, by taking advantage of the information-theoretic security of the transmitted messages, we develop a novel unconditionally secure message authentication code that is computed with a single multiplication operation. The goal of this work is to bring more research to the design of such unconditionally secure protocols, as opposed to the computationally secure protocols that have been proposed extensively, for the purpose of suiting the stringent computational capabilities of low-cost devices.

RFID systems often use near-field magnetic coupling to implement communication channels. The advertised operational range of these channels is less than 10 cm and therefore several implemented systems assume that the communication channel is location limited and therefore relatively secure. Nevertheless, there have been repeated questions raised about the vulnerability of these near-field systems against eavesdropping and skimming attacks. In this paper we revisit the topic of RFID eavesdropping and skimming attacks, surveying previous work and explaining why the feasibility of practical attacks is still a relevant and novel research topic. We present a brief overview of the radio characteristics for popular HF RFID standards and present some practical results for eavesdropping experiments against tokens adhering to the ISO 14443 and ISO 15693 standards. We also discuss how an attacker could construct a low-cost eavesdropping device using easy to obtain parts and reference designs. Finally, we present results for skimming experiments against ISO 14443 tokens.

Many distance bounding protocols appropriate for the RFID technology have been proposed recently. Unfortunately, they are commonly designed without any formal approach, which leads to inaccurate analyzes and unfair comparisons. Motivated by this need, we introduce a unified framework that aims to improve analysis and design of distance bounding protocols. Our framework includes a thorough terminology about the frauds, adversary and prover, thus disambiguating many misleading terms. It also explores the adversary's capabilities and strategies, and addresses the impact of the prover's ability to tamper with his device. It thus introduces some new concepts in the distance bounding domain as the black-box and white-box models, and the relation between the frauds with respect to these models. The relevancy and impact of the framework is finally demonstrated on a study case: Munilla–Peinado distance bounding protocol.

When an RFID tag changes hand, it is not as simply as handing over the tag secret to the new owner. Privacy is a concern if there is no secure ownership transfer scheme to aid the transfer. After sales service and temporary tag delegation are also features commonly seen in such applications. In this paper, we proposed a new RFID ownership transfer scheme that achieves the most security protections and properties in comparison to most of the previous schemes. We also introduced four new security properties that have not been considered before. This opens up new research directions for further development of RFID ownership transfer.

An RFID reader must authenticate its designated tags in order to prevent tag forgery and counterfeiting. At the same time, due to privacy requirements of many applications, a tag should remain anonymous and untraceable to an adversary during the authentication process. In this paper, we propose an “HB-like” protocol for privacy-preserving authentication of RFID tags. Previous protocols for privacy-preserving authentication were based on PRF computations. Our protocol can instead be used on low-cost tags that may be incapable of computing traditional PRFs. Moreover, since the underlying computations in HB protocols are very efficient, our protocol also reduces reader-side load compared to PRF-based protocols.

We suggest a tree-based approach that replaces the PRF-based authentication from prior work with a procedure such as HB+ or HB#. We optimize the tree-traversal stage through usage of a “light version” of the underlying protocol and shared random challenges across all levels of the tree. This provides significant reduction of the communication resources, resulting in a privacy-preserving protocol almost as efficient as the underlying HB+ or HB#. We also present analytical and simulation results comparing our method with prior proposals in terms of computation, communication and memory overheads.