A SHA-3 based RFID mutual authentication protocol and its implementation

Hash-based RFID authentication is an important method to provide security and privacy of RFID systems, due to the limitations of resource consumption and computation capability of RFID tags. A new RFID mutual authentication protocol is proposed based on the Keccak algorithm which is the winner of the SHA-3 competition and satisfies some properties of lightweight hash function. In the proposed protocol, a state-based pre-updating mechanism of the authentication key is presented to improve the reliability of protocol and the ability to resist DoS attack. Analysis shows that the proposed protocol is very secure and efficient and suitable for low-cost RFID authentication. The main resource consumption of the proposed protocol comes from the SHA-3 algorithm which is simulated in Synopsys Design Compiler. The results show that the area of the SHA-3 algorithm is 3519 GE which meets the requirement of low-cost RFID tag.