A Study on the Security of Lightweight Authentication Protocols

Abstract

In this thesis, we analyze and examine lightweight authentication protocols providing security to lightweight authentication protocol for resource constraine dedevices is a challenging task. Memory space, communication and computation power of a low-cost devices like RFID, smart cards, etc. is very limited and its infeasiblee to implement computationally intensive symmetric and asymmetric cryptog algorithms to low cost devices.Foremost, we briefly introduce cryptographic primitives, lightweight devices,its applications and their risks and threats. Further, we review related smart card based authentication protocols, RFID authentication protocols and ultralightweight RFID authentication protocols against the identified privacy, security and performance requirements. Later, we examine recently proposed authentication protocols on the basis of security and privacy. We cryptanalyze Sood et al. dynamic identity based authentication scheme using smart cards and gave a solution to upgrade the same so that identified weaknesses are resolved. We demonstrate security flaws and then upgrade Kumari et al. smart card based secure and robust remote user authentication scheme with key agreement. We briefly describe Vaudenay secuity and privacy model for RFID system. Then, we cryptanalyze recently proposed Zhuang et aultralightweight RFID authentication protocol for low cost tags and Dehkordi and Farzaneh improved hash based RFID mutual authentication protocol on the basis of Vaudenay untraceability model.