Efficient identity authentication and encryption technique for high throughput RFID system

Radio Frequency Identification RFID technology provides a seamless link between physical world and the information system in cyber space. However, the emerging Internet of Things and cloud systems are full of security holes, which introduce new challenging security problems in both tag identification and data privacy. In this paper, we present efficient methods for identity authentication and data encryption to enhance RFID privacy. The proposed techniques aim to ensure no adversary interacting with the tags and the reader, to infer any information on a tag's identity from the communication. The main idea, a symmetric cryptography technique, termed as Advanced Encryption Standard, was applied to implement both mutual authentication and data encryption between the front and back ends of RFID systems. The Advanced Encryption Standard cryptographic algorithm was adopted because of its low hardware complexity and high security strength. In addition, the proposed key management protocol is proved resistant to several known RFID attacks such as Man-in-the-Middle, Denial-of-Service, replay, clone attack, and backward/forward traceability. The computational time complexity of the proposed scheme through the entire identity authentication and data encryption phases is 3Tencrypt+1Tnonce+4Txor, which is superior to most existing approaches. The proposed scheme was also proved to be able to provide higher data encryption performance than other symmetric cryptographic algorithms with regard to the same level of security strength. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.