Hierarchical ECC-Based RFID Authentication Protocol

RFID (Radio Frequency identification) technology enables readers to scan remote RFID tags, and label the objects and people to which they are attached. Current cryptographic authentication protocols deployed in heterogeneous environments are often not compatible, or reveal too much information to the RPM readers. To tackle this problem, we introduce the concept of RFID groups and propose a hierarchical RFID authentication protocol. By using this protocol, an RFID tag can tune its identification process to the type of reader it is communicating with. Only a subset of readers can learn the identity of a particular tag, while others can only acquire information on the group to which the tag belongs. Our protocol offers impersonation resistance and is narrow-strong privacy-preserving. Furthermore, we extend the concept to multiple level of subgroups, and demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed protocols for RFID tags.