Group-based key array authentication protocol in radio frequency identification systems

For the purposes of information security and privacy between readers and tags, identity authentication is a significant issue for radio frequency identification (RFID) systems. In this study, the authors propose a novel security group-based key array authentication protocol, which is suitable for a large scale RFID environment. Based on a key array, this protocol can generate an authentication key for each pair of reader and tag with lower storage. Adding an identifier update phase, they design the authentication process passing the formal analysis from GNY. The security and performance analysis results show that the protocol they present can achieve better security than previous protocols in resisting external and internal attacks, with lower storage and acceptable communication and computation load.