KHB#: A Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol based on HB# for Low-cost RFID tags

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel paradigm that has a very good position in the scenario of modern wireless telecommunications. Key components of IoT are RFID systems. Since, the computing power and resource of RFID tags are expected to remain extremely limited to reduce the cost of RFID implementation, the RFID protocol designers cannot depend on the traditional cryptographic algorithms to protect the system. Thus many lightweight authentication protocols have been proposed such as HB, HB#, HB-MP+, etc. Although, HB# solves many problems of HB family of protocols, but this protocol is still vulnerable to Man in the Middle (MIM) attack. As far as we know, no MIM attacks could took place on HB-MP+ yet. But, it has high overhead because of using one way functions, which makes it inefficient to be used in RFID devices. In addition, HB# only provides authentication of tags for readers and mutual authentication is not described. In this paper we propose a secure protocol inspired from HB# and HB-MP+ which not only includes the advantages of both protocols but also provides mutual authentication (in contrast to HB#), prevents MIM attacks (in contrast to HB#) and satisfies main security goals needed for RFID systems (in contrast to HB-MP+).

Keywords:

IoT , HB# , HB-MP+ , lightweight authentication , mutual authentication