Security and Privacy Analysis of Song–Mitchell RFID Authentication Protocol

Many applications, such as e-passport, e-health, credit cards, and personal devices that utilize Radio frequency Identification (RFID) devices for authentication require strict security and privacy. However, RFID tags suffer from some inherent weaknesses due to restricted hardware capabilities and are vulnerable to eavesdropping, interception, or modification. The synchronization and untraceability characteristics are the major determinants of RFID authentication protocols. They are strongly related to privacy of tags and availability, respectively. In this paper, we analyze a new lightweight RFID authentication protocol, Song and Mitchell, in terms of privacy and security. We prove that not only is the scheme vulnerable to desynchronization attack, but it suffers from traceability and backward traceability as well. Finally, our improved scheme is proposed which can prevent aforementioned attacks.