An Improved RFID Authentication Protocol Based on Group Anonymous Model

Aiming at the security and privacy, and authentication efficiency shortages of existing RFID authentication protocol, an improved scheme is proposed based on Alavi et al.’s protocol. Firstly, in order to resist against replay attack, we add the timestamp generator to the reader side and use hash function to encrypt the reader identification, the random number and timestamp generated by the reader; meanwhile, to solve the data integrity problem in the original scheme, the reader matches the decrypted data with the server side message to ensure that it can detect if the data is tampered with by the attacker. Finally, the improved group anonymous authentication model is used to improve the back-end server’s authentication efficiency. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the improved protocol effectively solves the security problems and reduces the back-end server’s authentication time. In addition, this paper simulates the impact of group number on system privacy level and authentication efficiency through experiments. In practical applications, the group number can be adjusted appropriately according to different privacy and efficiency requirements, so the privacy and authentication efficiency of the system will be well-balanced.