An Efficient and Secure RFID Security Method
with Ownership Transfer
Kyosuke Osaka† Tsuyoshi Takagi† Kenichi Yamazaki‡ Osamu Takahashi†
†Future University-Hakodate
116-2, Kamedanakano, Hakodate,
041-8655, Japan
‡NTT DoCoMo, Inc.
3-5, Hikarinooka, Yokosuka,
239-8536, Japan
Abstract
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has come under
the spotlight as technology supporting ubiquitous society.
But now, we face several security problems and challenges
in RFID systems. Recent papers have reported that RFID
systems have to achieve the following requirements: (1)
Indistinguishability, (2) Forward Security, (3) Replay At-
tack, (4) Tag Killing, and (5) Ownership Transfer. We have
to design RFID system that achieves the above-mentioned
requirements. The previous methods achieve only some
of them individually, and no RFID system has been con-
structed that achieves all requirements. In this paper, we
propose an RFID security method that achieves all require-
ments based on a hash function and a symmetric key cryp-
tosystem. In addition, our proposed method provides not
only high-security but also high-efficiency.
1 Introduction
RFID has been used by manufacturing management,
custody control, management of humans and farm animals,
arrangement of books at some libraries, etc. From now, in-
tended purpose of RFID will be diversified, and will be used
in every nook and cranny. But now, we face several security
problems and challenges in RFID systems.
We consider that the RFID system is constructed as Tag,
Reader, and Database. The security problems in RFID sys-
tem arise from the following: data transmission between
Tag and Reader is unencrypted, Tags do not provide tamper
resistant because Tags are inexpensive micromini devices.
Hence Tag and Reader communicate in insecure. Therefore,
we face new threats in the RFID systems. Recent papers
have reported that RFID systems have to achieve the fol-
lowing requirements: (1) the security that the attacker can
not distinguish output of Tag (Indistinguishability [10]), (2)
the security that past data are secure even if present data on
Tag leaked out to the attacker (Forward Security [10]), (3)
the security against the attack that the attacker spoofs as le-
gitimate Tag (Replay Attack [11]), (4) the security against
the DoS attack that broadcasts large amount of Query to
Tag, then stops its working (Tag Killing [3]), (5) ownership
is transferable without invasion of owner’s privacy (Owner-
ship Transfer [13]). The previous methods have been pro-
posed to achieve only some of the above-mentioned require-
ments individually [1, 6, 10, 13, etc.]. No RFID system has
been constructed that achieves all requirements.
In this paper, we propose an RFID security method that
achieves all requirements based on a hash function and a
symmetric key cryptosystem. Proposed method provides
not only high-security but also high-efficiency.
This paper is constructed as follows: Section 2 describes
the RFID security systems and security requirements. It
also reviews the previous methods. Section 3 describes pro-
tocol and security of the proposed method. It also com-
pares the security and efficiency of the proposed method
with those of the previous methods. Section 4 describes
conclusion.
2 RFID Security Systems
RFID security system consists of the three components
(Database, Reader, and Tag). We describe the protocol of
the RFID security system that is treated in this paper.
Database holds the unique IDs of each Tag, and admin-
istrates the information related to the ID (e.g. time and
location, manufacturer name, ownership, etc.). We call it
Info(ID). During the protocol, the IDs are secretly held
by only Database all of the time, and the IDs are crypto-
graphically converted and distributed outside Database. We
call the converted IDs OutConv.ID
(j)
corresponding to
the IDs, where j is the number of communication start-
ing with j =1. In summary OutConv.ID
(j)
is the j-th
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