Abstract
Privacy preserving authentication (PPA) protocols were proposed to protect security of RFID. Generally, RFID readers must search the entire system to correctly match a tag. The time complexity of this search is O(N), which is obviously inefficient for a large RFID system. Fortunately, some PPA mechanisms adopt tree structures to manage tags and reduce the search complexity from linear to logarithm. Hence, the scalability of RFID is provided in tree-based privacy preserving authentication. However, in a tree-based protocol, compromising a tag may cause the other tags of the system to be vulnerable to some severe attacks. This is the most critical problem highlighted in tree-based protocols. This dissertation focuses on the important security issue mentioned above to design a secure and efficient RFID authentication protocol with scalability. We present a privacy preserving RFID authentication protocol suitable for a scale system. We apply tree-based structure to maintain the tag’s information. The tree-based structrue reduces the search complexity when the RFID system is with large tags in it. Moreover, a key update mechanism is also designed to meet the security requirement when tag is being compromised. The proposed protocol not only withstands desynchronizing attack and tracking attack, it provides scalability with O(log N) search complexity.