A lightweight and anonymous RFID tag authentication protocol with cloud assistance for e-healthcare applications

As an important part of Internet of Things, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system employs low-cost RFID tag to communicate with everything containing animate and inanimate objects. This technology is widely used in the e-healthcare applications. However, the malicious communication environment makes people more and more worried. In order to overcome the hazards in the network, RFID authentication schemes for e-healthcare have been proposed by researchers. But since the computation ability of the tag is relatively weak, it is necessary to put forward a lightweight and secure scheme for medical systems. Moreover, cloud is widely accepted by people and used in many kinds of systems. So we propose a novel and lightweight RFID authentication scheme with cloud for e-healthcare applications. We use an enhanced formal security model to prove the security of our scheme. In this model the channel between the server and the reader is considered to be insecure and informal analysis is used to prove the security of the proposed scheme. Through the formal and informal analysis, our scheme not only resists the common attacks, but also keeps mutual authentication, information integrity, forward untraceability and backward untraceability. Moreover, both the tag and the reader can reach the anonymity. Our scheme is only hash-based and suitable to realize various security requirements. Compared to recent schemes of the same sort, it is more applicable in e-healthcare.