A Novel Group Ownership Delegate Protocol for RFID Systems

In recent years, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications of various kinds have been blooming. However, along with the stunning advancement have come all sorts of security and privacy issues, for RFID tags oftentimes store private data and so the permission to read a tag or any other kind of access needs to be carefully controlled. Therefore, of all the RFID-related researches released so far, a big portion focuses on the issue of authentication. There have been so many cases where the legal access to or control over a tag needs to be switched from one reader to another, which has encouraged the development of quite a number of different kinds of ownership transfer protocols. On the other hand, not only has the need for ownership transfer been increasing, but a part of it has also been evolving from individual ownership transfer into group ownership transfer. However, in spite of the growing need for practical group ownership transfer services, little research has been done to offer an answer to the need. In this paper, we shall present a new RFID time-bound group ownership delegate protocol based on homomorphic encryption and quadratic residues. In addition, in order to provide more comprehensive service, on top of mutual authentication and ownership delegation, we also offer options for the e-th time verification as well as the revocation of earlier delegation.