ECC-based lightweight authentication protocol with untraceability for low-cost RFID

Due to the potential wide deployment of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), the security of RFID systems has drawn extensive attention from both academia and industry, and the RFID authentication protocol is an important mechanism in the security of RFID systems. The desired security requirements of RFID authentication protocols include privacy, integrity, authentication, anonymity/untraceability, and even availability. To design an efficient protocol that satisfies all the requirements with limited resources is a challenge. This paper proposes a new RFID authentication protocol based on Error Correction Codes (ECC). The proposed scheme has excellent performance in terms of security, efficiency, server’s maintenance, robustness, and cost. The tag only performs simple operations, such as random number generation and simple bitwise computations. The lightweight feature makes it attractive to those low-cost RFIDs that support only simple operations.