A Tree-Based Authentication Scheme for a Cloud Toll/traffic RFID System

Existing RFID schemes targeting traffic management contexts are mainly conceptual and prototypical. Little attention has been given to the important issue of authentication. With the rapid migration to cloud-based technology, there is a pressing urgency for addressing authentication in toll/traffic RFID solutions. This paper presents a toll/traffic RFID authentication scheme which benefits from the well-known Merkle Hash Trees. The main benefit of MHTs is its scalability compared to traditional schemes. In order to increase scalability, we propose a scheme that significantly lowers the computation complexity of the traditional MHTs. In our proposed scheme, we achieve better performance and improve traditional MHTs by a simple division mechanism. Initial evaluation results demonstrate these benefits and show promising direction for further research.