A novel key management protocol for RFID systems

The increasing demand to deploy efficient ways of identification has made Radio frequency Identification (RFID) technology ubiquitous. Due to the wireless nature of communication between the reader and the tag, this technology imposes major security and privacy threats. Massive work to design a powerful authentication protocol has been put to overcome various threats against privacy and security of the system. However, certain constraints on RFID tags such as limited computation capabilities, memory size and communication cost, has made most approaches fail to conduct fully secured RFID system. In this paper, we present a novel cryptographic scheme, Hacker Proof Authentication Protocol (HPAP), that allows mutual authentication between the reader and the tag as well as secure tags´ information. We prove our protocol achieves full security by deploying tag static identifier, updated timestamp, a one way hash function and encryption keys with semi randomized nature as they are updated using Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR). Simulation using C#.NET shows that the protocol is secure against various attacks. Comparison against various existing RFID authentication protocols prove that our protocol maintain less storage, computation load and low-cost.