Hindawi Publishing Corporation
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Volume 2013, Article ID 784618, 8 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/784618
Research Article
APP: An Ultralightweight Scheme to Authenticate
ONS and Protect EPC Privacy without Cryptography in
EPCglobal Networks
Wei Ren,
1,2
Liangli Ma,
3
and Yi Ren
4
1
School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China
2
Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computer Network, Jinan 250014, China
3
School of Electronic Engineering, Naval University of Engineering, Wuhan 430033, China
4
Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan
Correspondence should be addressed to Wei Ren; weirencs@cug.edu.cn
Received 21 January 2013; Revised 10 April 2013; Accepted 22 April 2013
Academic Editor: Danny Hughes
Copyright © 2013 Wei Ren et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
EPCglobal network is used to share product data between trading partners, which was proposed by EPCglobal. Object Name Service
(ONS) in EPCglobal framework raises two critical security risks: the authenticity of IP addresses for Physical Markup Language
(PML) servers and the privacy of Electronic Product Codes (EPCs). Existing work considers either the IP address authentication or
the EPC privacy. In addition, that work mainly relies on cryptographic tools, in which key distribution is not a trivial task and also
causes a large amount of computation overhead. In this paper, we make the rst attempt to solve those two security risks together
without relying cryptography. We propose a scheme, namely, APP (authenticate ONS and protect EPC privacy), to guarantee the
authenticity of IP addresses for PML servers as well as EPC privacy and to maintain ultralightweight computation cost. Moreover,
we give formal denition of the authenticity and the privacy in ONS context. e security achievements are strictly analyzed and
proved. e extensive analysis results justify the applicability of the proposed scheme.
1. Introduction
EPCglobal is a typical network framework for the Internet of
ings (IoT), machine to Machine (M2M), and RFID net-
works.Ithasbeenenvisionedasakeymethodtorecognize,
locate, and trace EPC-enabled physical objects (e.g., RFIDs
or sensors). Moreover, it is used to facilitate supply chain
management, food trace back, logistics, and so forth.
Concretely, EPCglobal relies on Object Name Service
(ONS) to map Electronic Product Code (EPC) to an IP
address of a server. e server, called Physical Markup
Language (PML) server in EPCglobal, provides detailed
product information of the EPC. To do so, an EPC tag reader
obtainsEPCsfromtagsandsubmitstheEPCstoONS.Based
on the received EPCs, ONS returns the IP address of the
corresponding server. Generally speaking, the architecture of
ONS consists of distributed server systems and can support
iteratively query for scalability and exibility.
ONS architecture raises two security concerns: one is the
authenticity of returning results. If the returning results are
fake, the product information will be detoured to a forged
server with garbage information. e other is the privacy of
EPC. If EPC is revealed by ONS server, the user’s privacy may
be damaged. For example, a user looks up an EPC for a bottle
of medical tablets that is privacy sensitive. Unfortunately,
above security risks have not been largely recognized, and
rare works exist to address both risks at the same time.
Currently, a few works use some similar methods for DNS
security [1], rely on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) [2], or
depend on P2P architecture [3]. ose solutions experience
many diculties: e schemes relying on cryptography
usually induce extensive computation overhead. e key
distribution and management issues raise many deployment
hurdles. e assumption of existing PKI is unrealistic in
the current situation. Some solutions such as P2P solution
require the migration of underlying network architecture.