ITPMAP: An Improved Three-Pass Mutual Authentication Protocol for Secure RFID Systems

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a wireless technology used in various applications to minimize the complexity of everyday life. However, it opens a large number of security and privacy issues that require to be addressed before its successful deployment. Many RFID authentication protocols are proposed in recent years to address security and privacy issues, and most of them are based on lightweight cryptographic techniques such as pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs), or bitwise logical operations. However, the existing RFID authentication protocols suffer from security weaknesses, and cannot solve most of the security and privacy problems. A new solution is necessary to address security and privacy issues. In this paper, an improved three-pass mutual authentication protocol (ITPMAP) for low-cost RFID tags is proposed to offer an adequate security level for RFID systems. The proposed ITPMAP protocol uses one PRNG on the tag side and heavy-weighted cryptographic techniques (i.e., digital signature and password-based encryption schemes) on the back-end server side instead of lightweight cryptographic techniques to address the security and privacy issues. The ITPMAP protocol is secure against various attacks such as cloning, spoofing, replay, and desynchronization attacks. Furthermore, as a proof of concept, the ITPMAP protocol is adopted to propose the design of three real-life RFID systems; namely: Signing and Verification of Graduation Certificate System, issuing and verification of e-ticketing system, and charging and discharging of prepaid card system. The Unified Modeling Language is used to demonstrate the design of the proposed ITPMAP protocol and systems. Java language is used for the implementation of the proposed systems. In addition, the Mifare Classic tags and readers are used as RFID apparatuses for the proposed systems.