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Security Analysis and Complexity Comparison
of Some Recent Lightweight RFID Protocols
Ehsan Vahedi, Rabab K. Ward, and Ian F. Blake
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
{
vahedi,rababw,ifblake
}
@ece.ubc.ca
Abstract.
Using RFID tags can simplify many applications and pro-
vide many benefits, but the privacy of the customers should be taken
into account. A potential threat for the privacy of a user is that anony-
mous readers can obtain information about the tags in the system. In
order to address the security issues of RFID systems, various schemes
have been proposed. Among the various solutions, lightweight protocols
have attracted much attention as they are more appropriate for the lim-
ited architecture of RFID tags. In this paper, we perform the security
analysis of five lightweight protocols proposed in [1-4] and discuss their
advantages and security issues. The computational complexity of these
lightweight protocols are also compared in this work.
1
Introduction
Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a ubiquitous wireless technology which
allows objects to be identified automatically. For pervasive deployment of RFID
systems, one issue which causes public's concern is privacy. Many research activi-
ties have been devoted in the area of RFID security and privacy recently. Various
attacks on the current algorithms, protocols and implementations showed that
the privacy of RFID systems should be taken into account more seriously. Some
customers are concerned about being tracked by other readers when they are car-
rying items (such as clothes, medicine or currency) embedded with RFID tags. In
addition to tracking people, RFID tags may also be used to extract personal in-
formation such as the type of clothes somebody wears, the specific brand that an
individual is interested in, or some medical information about the patient carry-
ing an RFID-embedded container of medicine [5]. RFID tags may also be used by
some malicious organizations or dealers that sell fake RFID embedded items and
forge them as valuable items [5]. Denial of service (DoS) is another type of prob-
lemwhichcanbecausedbyattackerswhose aim is to disrupt an RFID system [6].
Moreover, some specific RFID applications demand specific considerations.
In order to cope with security issues of RFID systems, various schemes have
been proposed. These solutions can be divided into two general groups. The first
group uses blocking, jamming and physical solutions [7]. The other group uses
cryptographic concepts and privacy preserving protocols. Cryptographic solutions
for RFID security issues can be divided into two main groups, lightweight and
complex cryptographic solutions. Some researchers believe that it is possible to
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