An efficient ultralightweight mutual authentication scheme for RFID systems: Airy protocol

Since Peris-Lopez et al. proposed the design of ultralightweight authentication schemes for low-cost RFID tags in 2006, research community has demonstrated a significant advancement on this interesting research area in recent years. However, previously published studies are subject to either various security vulnerabilities or inefficient management on tag memory. Motivated by the nature of resource limitation in a RFID tag, we develop a process-oriented ultralightweight RFID authentication scheme, called Airy protocol, which delivers strong security intensity, robust privacy protection as well as less tag memory space required. We perform formal logic analysis on Airy to ensure robust security intensity. In addition, a randomness evaluation on the output values of Airy is adopted to ensure the proposed authentication protocol produces qualified output randomness. Our security analysis and performance comparison show that Airy outperforms relevant works by supporting essential system security criteria with less computation effort and better tag memory utilization.