An efficient authentication protocol for RFID-based supply chains

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an automatic wireless data collection technology which can be used to precisely identify objects through radio waves. Nowadays, RFID has an important application in supply chain systems. When RFID tags are attached to valuable products for identification, however, they are under a potential risk of being invaded and re-written with fake tag, which will lead to economic losses and is even harmful to people’s health. Therefore, path authentication has aroused great concern in modern society as it has the function of maintaining object pedigree and supply chain integrity. Existing path authentication protocols for RFID based supply chains are path grained which means that they need some readers worked as managers to preload the sets of valid paths and then to verify whether tags go through a valid path. Recently, Bu et al. proposed a novel path authentication named StepAuth in which the readers don’t need to preload any valid paths before authentication. StepAuth reduces the risks of leaking valid paths. In this paper, we propose a new tag path authentication protocol for RFID-based supply chain, which further improves the efficiency of StepAuth and allows the public keys of readers to be published.