A novel authentication protocol enabling RFID tags ownership transfer

Ownership of RFID tag may be frequently changed during its lifetime, thus how to securely transfer its ownership between owners is very important. Recently, some lightweight cryptograph-based authentication protocols have been proposed to resolve the problem, but most of them assume that the channel between the RFID reader and the database server is secure, and ignore the backward un-traceability. Hence during the ownership transfer operations, there exist inevitably some security/privacy vulnerabilities exposed to malicious users and its previous owner. In this paper, we propose a novel authentication protocol enabling RFID tags ownership transfer. Based on challenge-response mechanism, the protocol achieves mutual authentication between the tag and the database. Moreover, it provides the authentication to prevent the fake reader. Also, based on BAN logic we give the proof of protocol correctness. The merit of our protocol is that it not only well protects owner´s privacy but also achieves high-security and high-efficiency.