Dual cryptography authentication protocol and its security analysis for radio frequency identification systems

The open radio frequency identification (RFID) air interface may suffer from severe threats that make security problem become a critical issue for RFID systems and applications. This paper proposes a dual cryptography authentication protocol (DCAP) for RFID systems. DCAP partitions randomly the tag identifier into two partial identifiers that are used in the forward link and in the backward link, respectively. The protocol applies hash function and shared-key encryption algorithm to safeguard both forward and backward links and provides a three-round authentication mode on each tag and reader in a session. Then, authentication is carried out by the primary, secondary, and final verifications. For a formal analysis, a graphical method Colored Petri Nets is applied to model and analyze the correctness of DCAP. We prove that the protocol owns tag anonymity and forward security and has the capability to resist major attacks such as replay, reader forgery, and tag forgery. Finally, the performance in terms of storage, communication overhead, and computation load is evaluated to demonstrate that the protocol has modest complexity and high efficiency.