A study on secure RFID mutual authentication scheme in pervasive computing environment

RFID, a core technology that can be used to create a ubiquitous society, is a non-contact recognition system in which a small chip attached to various types of products transmits and processes information regarding the product and the surrounding environment via wireless communication. As a wireless recognition technology, RFID consumes little power, is small, and allows one to communicate in virtually any environment. It is thus expected to be very convenient. However, due to these characteristics of RFID systems, it may also pose a serious threat to privacy. A number of studies are currently being conducted to address this problem. Most of these studies use secure communication channels between a database and a reader, and insecure communication channels between a reader and a tag. However, this paper proposes a secure authentication protocol to provide information to an authorized entity by applying recognition technology in an insecure communication channel even for the communication between the database and the reader. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.