Wise Counting: Fast and Efficient Batch Authentication for Large-Scale RFID Systems

Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID) is widely used in many applications, such as asset monitoring, e-passport and electronic payment, and is becoming one of the most effective solutions in cyber physical system. Since the identification alone does not provide any guarantee that tag corresponds to genuine identity, authentication of tag information is needed in most RFID systems. Meanwhile, as the number of tags is rapidly growing in recent years, per-tag based methods suffer from severely low efficiency and thus give way to probabilistic batch authentication. Most previous methods, however, share a common drawback from statistical perspective: they fail to explore correlation information, i.e., they do not comprehensively utilize all the information in authentication data structures. In addition, those schemes are not scalable well when multiple tag sets need to be verified simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient batch authentication scheme, Wise Counting (WIC), for large-scale RFID systems. We are the first to formally introduce the general batch authentication problem with multiple tag sets and give counterfeits estimation scheme with high efficiency. By employing a novel hierarchical authentication structure, we show that WIC is able to fast and efficiently authenticate both a single tag set and multiple tag sets in an easy, intuitive way. Through detailed theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, we validate the design of WIC and demonstrate its large superiority over state-of-the art approaches.