A lightweight RFID authentication protocol based on Rabin cryptosystem

Abstract RFID is an important technology that can be used to create the ubiquitous society. An RFID system uses open radio wave to transfer information and this leads to pose a serious threat to its privacy and security. The current mainstream RFID tags are some low-cost passive tags. They usually have very limited computing and memory resources and this makes it difficult to solve their security and privacy problems. Lightweight authentication protocols are considered as an effective approach to assure the security and privacy of the low-cost RFID systems. Some typical authentication protocols usually use Hash functions so that they require more computing and memory resources. Rabin cryptosystem is a simple encryption function and it needs less computing and memory resources than Hash functions. Based on Rabin cryptosystem, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol. This protocol provides forward security and it can prevent information leakage, location tracing, eavesdropping, replay attack, spoofing, and DOS-attack effectively. It is very suitable to some low-cost RFID systems.