Improved Flyweight RFID Authentication Protocol

The widespread implementation of RFID in ubiquitous computing is constrained considerably by privacy and security unreliability of the wireless communication channel. This failure to satisfy the basic, security needs of the technology has a direct impact of the limited computational capability of the tags, which are essential for the implementation of RFID. Because the universal application of RFID means the use of low cost tags, their security is limited to lightweight cryptographic primitives. Therefore, EPCGen2, which is a class of low cost tags, has the enabling properties to support their communication protocols. This means that satisfying the security needs of EPCGen2 could ensure low cost security because EPCGen2 is a class of low cost, passive tags. In that way, a solution to the hindrance of low cost tags lies in the security of EPCGen2. To this effect, many lightweight authentication protocols have been proposed to improve the privacy and security of communication protocols suitable for low cost tags. Although many EPCgen2 compliant protocols have been proposed to ensure the security of low cost tags, the optimum security has not been guaranteed because many protocols are prone to well-known attacks or fall short of acceptable computational load. This paper proposes a remedy protocol to the flyweight RFID authentication protocol proposed by Burmester and Munilla against a desynchronization attack. Based on shared pseudorandom number generator, this protocol provides mutual authentication, anonymity, session unlinkability and forward security in addition to security against a desynchronization attack. The desirable features of this protocol are efficiency and security.