Security analysis of an RFID tag search protocol

摘要

Over the past decade, tag search protocols have been suggested to efficiently acquire a specific RFID tag among a large group of tags by an RFID reader. For instance, in a warehouse, where there are thousands of packages each having an RFID tag attached, staffs may find specific packages using a reader that employs a tag search protocol. Although tag search protocols promise convenience, most of them can threaten the privacy of RFID tags in different ways. For instance, an attacker can impersonate a tag to replace it with another tag or can find the identity of a tag to track it. Recently, Sundaresan et al. have proposed an RFID tag search protocol based on 128-bit pseudo random number generators and exclusive-or operations which both can be easily implemented on low-cost RFID passive tags in EPC global Class-I Gen-2 standard even for large-scale implementations. They claim that their protocol not only offers anonymity, location privacy and forward secrecy for the reader and the tag, but also resists against de-synchronization, replay and impersonation attacks. In this paper, we analyze the security of their proposed tag search protocol and show that the protocol is vulnerable to de-synchronization and impersonation attacks and also cannot provide location privacy for the tag. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.