Paper 2009/092

Reducing RFID Reader Load with the Meet-in-the-Middle Strategy

Jung Hee Cheon and Jeongdae Hong and Gene Tsudik

Abstract

In almost any RFID system, a reader needs to identify, and optionally authenticate, a multitude of tags. If each tag has a unique secret, identification and authentication are trivial, however, the reader (or a back-end server) needs to perform a brute-force search for each tag-reader interaction. In this paper, we suggest a simple, efficient and secure technique that reduces reader computation to $O(\sqrt N \cdot \log N)$. Our technique is based on the well-known ``meet-in-the-middle'' strategy used in the past to attack certain symmetric ciphers.