Efficient serverless radio-frequency identification mutual authentication and secure tag search protocols with untrusted readers

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology's potential relies on advances made by researchers for addressing the technology's security and privacy vulnerabilities, and making data collection and storage in an RFID system safe. Privacy and security are key concerns, as paramount as efficiency and reliability, in raising the confidence of end users towards RFID technologies. This study proposes two complementary lightweight and efficient serverless security protocols in the presence of untrusted RFID readers. The first one is used for mass authentication of RFID tags and supports mutual authentication with key establishment. The second one is an RFID tag search protocol that helps interacting with one specific tag surrounded by a huge number of other tags. The originality of both protocols holds that no shared parameters are required between tags and readers for mutual authentication support, they refer to the same basic material, and they have low resource demands in storage, bandwidth, energy and computation for both RFID readers and tags. Finally, the authors' protocols have been formally verified under the computational model using CryptoVerif tool.