A Mixed and Batching Authentication Protocol for Grouped Tags in Mobile RFID System

Mobile radio frequency identification (RFID) systems are being employed in many applications such as supply chain management. Since the communications between RFID-reader and server, RFID-tag and RFID-reader are all wireless, security and privacy attracts more attentions, reflected in the research on authentication protocols. But most of the existing authentications only care about the front end (reader to tag) and ignore the back end (reader to server), which could not satisfy the security demands in the mobile RFID systems. Moreover, the tags have to be grouped when the population is large enough, but the existing authentication protocols are inapplicable in this scenario. In this paper, we propose a mixed authentication protocol composed of hash-based authentication for readers and lightweight authentication for low-cost tags to fit the mobile RFID system with grouping tags. Analysis demonstrates that the proposed authentication protocol could efficiently counteract the impersonation attack, reply attack and tracking attack.