Enhancing authentication in radio frequency identification systems by designing a fully fledged class protocol

The main topic of this thesis is the security problems of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system, one of the most important technologies of recent years. Despite the numerous advantages of RFID technology, it faces a major security and privacy threats. Because of the wireless communication nature between reader and tag, RFID technology is vulnerable to many attacks. Since, authentication adds trust to the identifing process, authentication protocols are first step in protection against wireless attacks and only the authenticated reader can access the contents of the authenticated tags. As a first step in this thesis, a class related comprehensive survey, review and comparison of the most recent and considerable RFID mutual authentication protocols are made in detail. The significant points of the compare are presented in two tables. The outcome of the comparison revealed that the investigated authentication protocols have adopted various methods to deal with attacks and ensure security and privacy. Due to hardware restriction of the low cost tags, most of the investigated authentication protocols are lie under fully fledged class. Besides, every examined protocols has a particular capability to handle the security and privacy issues. Secondly, in this thesis an efficient and powerful RFID mutual authentication protocol is proposed named AERMAP-W5. AERMAP-W5 uses both private and public key algorithms, AES and ECC. Two methods are used during the authentication process. Dissimilar the existing schemes, AERMAP-W5 is coded, tested and proven on real devices and could send tag ID and valuable data as well. Moreover, in AERMAP-W5, mutual authentication has been realized in only 2 steps. Finally, the security and performance of AERMAP-W5 is thoroughly analyzed and the results show that it can stand out against almost all common attacks and satisfies the essential security requirements of RFID-based healthcare systems.