Enhancing privacy and security of RFID system with serverless authentication and search protocols in pervasive environments

One of the recent realms that gathered attention of researchers is the security issues of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems that have tradeoff between controlled costs and improved efficiency. Evolvement and benefits of RFID technology signifies that it can be low-cost, efficient and secured solution to many pervasive applications. But RFID technology will not intermingle into human lives until prevailing and flexible privacy mechanisms are conceived. However, ensuring strong privacy has been an enormous challenge due to extremely inadequate computational storage of typical RFID tags. So in order to relieve tags from responsibility, privacy protection and security assurance was guaranteed by central server. In this paper, we suggest serverless, forward secure and untraceable authentication protocol for RFID tags. This authentication protocol safeguards both tag and reader against almost all major attacks without the intervention of server. Though it is very critical to guarantee untraceability and scalability simultaneously, here we are proposing a scheme to make our protocol more scalable via ownership transfer. To the best of our knowledge this feature is incorporated in the serverless system for the first time in pervasive environments. One extension of RFID authentication is RFID tag searching, which has not been givenmuch attention so far. But we firmly believe that in near future tag searching will be a significant issue RFID based pervasive systems. So in this paper we propose a serverless RFID tag searching protocol in pervasive environments. This protocol can search a particular tag efficiently without server's intervention. Furthermore they are secured against major security threats.