International Association
for Cryptologic Research

RFID tags are getting their presence noticeable on smartphones,

credit cards, toll payment devices, and other objects. They are

expected to become an important tool for e-commerce, logistics,

point-of-sale transactions, and so on, representing ``things\'\' and

``human holding things\'\' in transactions. Since a huge amount of tags are expected to be needed to be attached to various ``objects,\'\' a low-cost tag manufacturing is necessary. Thus, it is hard to imagine they will implement hardware protection mechanisms (like co-processor, TPMs). Therefore, side-channel (leakage) attacks are a critical threat. Another threat that is well known in the RFID topic is tag tracing and violation of privacy.

In this paper, we consider physically unclonable functions (PUFs) as tamper resilient building block and propose security model with memory leaking adversary, trying to violate security and privacy of tags (we note that PUFs are structure-less and there is a hope they can be put on top of RFID chips more so than TPMs). We then design the first provably secure and provably private RFID authentication protocol withstanding information leakage from the non-volatile memory of the tag, and provides the two properties of: (1) security against impersonation, and (2) privacy protection against tag tracing.