EMAP: An Efficient Mutual Authentication Protocol for Passive RFID Tags

Radio frequency identification (RFID) system is a contactless automatic identification system, which uses small and low cost RFID tags. The primary problem of current security and privacy preserving schemes is that, in order to identify only one single tag, these schemes require a linear computational complexity on the server side. We propose an efficient mutual authentication protocol for passive RFID tags that provides confidentiality, untraceability, mutual authentication, and efficiency. The proposed protocol shifts the heavy burden of asymmetric encryption and decryption operations on the more powerful server side and only leaves lightweight hash operation on tag side. It is also efficient in terms of time complexity, space complexity, and communication cost, which are very important for practical large-scale RFID applications.