FLMAP: A fast lightweight mutual authentication protocol for RFID systems

Abstract

Numerous authentication protocols for RFID systems were proposed as attempt to prevent unauthorized tracking and monitoring, impersonation or cloning, and information leakage. Many of such attempts cannot establish essential requirements that one robust authentication protocol must guarantee. In this paper, we propose a rapid mutual authentication protocol, called FLMAP, that overcomes all the drawbacks of previously proposed protocols. Our protocol has three passes and it does not use any cryptographic primitives such as hash functions and encryption algorithms; it is very fast and efficient. Significant characteristics of the protocol are forward security, tag anonymity, location privacy, resistance to disclosure attack, low complexity on the back-end server, and scalability. To the best of our knowledge, our protocol offers the most enhanced security features in RFID mutual authentication protocols with respect to user privacy. In analyzing the protocol, we show how remarkable properties such as forward security and tag anonymity are guaranteed.