Vulnerability analysis of RFID protocols for tag ownership transfer

In RFIDSec’08, Song proposed an ownership transfer scheme, which consists of an ownership transfer protocol and a secret update protocol [7]. The ownership transfer protocol is completely based on a mutual authentication protocol proposed in WiSec’08 [8]. In Rizomiliotis et al. (2009) [6], van Deursen and Radomirovic (2008), the first weaknesses to be identified (tag and server impersonation) were addressed and this paper completes the consideration of them all. We find that the mutual authentication protocol, and therefore the ownership transfer protocol, possesses certain weaknesses related to most of the security properties initially required in protocol design: tag information leakage, tag location tracking, and forward traceability. Moreover, the secret update protocol is not immune to de-synchronization attacks.