Symmetric key based RFID authentication protocol with a secure key-updating scheme

RFID technology is being widely employed in various pervasive applications. Therefore, security and privacy protection for RFID systems is an important issue that needs to be addressed. In this paper, we present a secure mutual authentication protocol for RFID systems that is based on symmetric key technique with an efficient key updating mechanism. The objective is to improve the RFID system security against replay, de-synchronization, eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks while maintaining lower computation, communication and storage. We also compare our authentication method with three recent protocols that deploy the same block cipher (XTEA) by implementing all the protocols on the same RF based hardware. Our proposed authentication protocol provides high security level and low computation and communication costs.