Security analysis of low cost RFID systems

RFID technology attracts strong interest worldwide; it provides a means for automatic identification of objects and is regarded as an indispensable part in the vision of the Internet of things. With the aid of RFID systems, life shall become more convenient and businesses shall become more productive. The low cost RFID technology faces serious security and privacy threats, wireless communication and cost-down consideration on RFID systems are the two main factors that cause these security threats. In order to comply with the resource constraint, a few new authentication protocols with lightweight encryptions are invented to fit the physical limitation of a passive tag. However, those proposed schemes cannot provide enough security level in general; more specifically, they cannot prevent all major or general attacks such as eavesdropping, tracking, replay attack and Denial of Service, and preserve the forward secrecy of tagged object at the same time. © 2014 IEEE.