Security of lightweight mutual authentication protocols

Sensors and IoT (Internet of Things), which include RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) tags, have witnessed widespread adoption across a wide variety of application domains over the last two decades. These sensors and IoT devices are often a part of distributed sensor networks. As with any distributed processing scenario, there is a need to ensure that these devices provide required security and privacy to the tagged object as well as its bearer. Cryptography has been used to address the security and privacy aspects of RFID tags. Unlike a majority of other IoT devices, the commonly used passive RFID tags are extremely resource-constrained and therefore can accommodate only lightweight operations. Security and privacy concerns still need to be addressed as they remain significant regardless of implementation details. We evaluate RFID-based lightweight mutual authentication protocols that have been recently proposed and identify vulnerabilities.