Paper 2013/820

On the Security of Recently Proposed RFID Protocols

Mete Akgün and M. Ufuk Çaǧlayan

Abstract

RFID authentication protocols should have a secret updating phase in order to protect the privacy of RFID tags against tag tracing attacks. In the literature, there are many lightweight RFID authentication protocols that try to provide key updating with lightweight cryptographic primitives. In this paper, we analyse the security of two recently proposed lightweight RFID authentication protocol against de-synchronization attacks. We show that secret values shared between the back-end server and any given tag can be easily desynchronised. This weakness stems from the insufficient design of these protocols.