A hybrid approach for privacy-preserving RFID tags

Recently, there have been a considerable amount of works for privacy-preserving RAID tags. However, most existing schemes have a common, inherent problem in the fact that in order to identify only one single tag they require a linear computational complexity on the system side. This problem makes use of the schemes impractical in large-scale RFID deployments. We propose a new scheme for privacy-preserving RFID tags which combines the classical challenge-response mechanism with the idea of one-time pads in a simple but practical way. Our technique has a number of crucial advantages. It supports mutual authentication between reader and tag. It also supports untraceability with no information leakage. Furthermore, the scheme we present requires only one cryptographic operation to identify one device among N, which is an important benefit in large-scale RFID systems. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.