Anti-cloning protocol suitable to EPCglobal Class-1 Generation-2 RFID systems

Abstract

Radio frequency Identification (RFID) systems are used to identify remote objects equipped with RFID tags by wireless scanning without manual intervention. Recently, EPCglobal proposed the Electronic Product Code (EPC) that is a coding scheme considered to be a possible successor to bar-code with added functionalities. In RFID-based applications where RFID tags are used to identify and track tagged objects, an RFID tag emits its EPC in plaintext. This makes the tag inevitably vulnerable to cloning attacks as well as information leakage and password disclosure. In this paper, we propose a novel anti-cloning method in accordance with the EPCglobal Class-1 Generation-2 (C1G2) standard. Our method only uses functions that can be supported by the standard and abides by the communication flow of the standard. The method is also secure against threats such as information leakage and password disclosure. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.