A New Ultralightweight RFID Protocol for Low-Cost Tags: R$$^{2}$$2AP

Several ultralightweight radio frequency identification (RFID) authentication protocols have been proposed in recent years. However, all of these protocols are reported later that they are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks (such as replay attack, de-synchronization attack, full disclosure attack, etc.) and/or have user privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a new ultralightweight RFID protocol named reconstruction based RFID authentication protocol (R$$^{2}$$2AP), which is based on the use of a new bitwise operation reconstruction. Operation reconstruction has three important properties: Hamming weight unpredictability, irreversibility and effectiveness. Some or all of these properties are absent in previous protocols and therefore has caused a lot of insecurity issues. The proposed R$$^{2}$$2AP takes advantage of reconstruction to guarantee security of RFID system. Furthermore, we improve the Juels–Weis untraceability model so that the extended mathematic model can be used to analyze security functionality for ultralightweight RFID protocols. Our security analysis and performance evaluations demonstrate that (1) R$$^{2}$$2AP can withstand all attacks mentioned in the paper and protect users’ privacy; (2) R$$^{2}$$2AP is indeed an effective RFID protocol that can be implemented on low-cost tags.