Towards secure authenticating of cache in the reader for RFID-based IoT systems

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) in Internet of things (IoT) has led to a significant progress in numerous intelligent devices. However, due to its restrictions on computation ability, storage space and battery capacity, RFID-based IoT system has to confront with various security and efficiency challenges. Recently, a lightweight RFID mutual authentication protocol with cache in the reader is introduced by Fan et al., named LRMAPC. Fan et al.’s LRMAPC can achieve stronger security and privacy requirements and reduce the computation and storage overheads during authentication process. Unfortunately, we discover that Fan et al.’s LRMAPC is susceptible to reader impersonation attack, tag forgery attack and message eavesdropping attack. Besides, it fails to preserve mutual authentication between the reader and the database. In order to remedy these flaws mentioned above, we further present an advanced authentication mechanisms and demonstrate the correctness of the advanced LRMAPC through the Gong-Needham-Yahalom (GNY) logic analysis. Compared the security and efficiency with Fan et al.’s LRMAPC, the advanced LRMAPC satisfies desirable security requirements and maintains acceptable efficiency in terms of the costs of storage space and computation time. As a result, our advanced LRMAPC is a very promising solution for resource-constrained devices in RFID-based IoT systems.