Achieving protection against man-in-the-middle attack in HB family protocols implemented in RFID tags

Abstract

Purpose

In the past few years, HB-like protocols have gained much attention in the field of lightweight authentication protocols due to their efficient functioning and large potential applications in low-cost radio frequency identification tags, which are on the other side spreading so fast. However, most published HB protocols are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks such as GRS or OOV attacks. The purpose of this research is to investigate security issues pertaining to HB-like protocols with an aim of improving their security and efficiency.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, a new and secure variant of HB family protocols named HB-MP* is proposed and designed, using the techniques of random rotation. The security of the proposed protocol is proven using formal proofs. Also, a prototype of the protocol is implemented to check its applicability, test the security in implementation and to compare its performance with the most related protocol.

Findings

The HB-MP* protocol is found secure against passive and active adversaries and is implementable within the tight resource constraints of today’s EPC-type RFID tags. Accordingly, the HB-MP* protocol provides higher security than previous HB-like protocols without sacrificing performance.

Originality/value

This paper proposes a new HB variant called HB-MP* that tries to be immune against the pre-mentioned attacks and at the same time keeping the simple structure. It will use only lightweight operations to randomize the rotation of the secret.

Citation

Aseeri, A. and Bamasag, O. (2016), "Achieving protection against man-in-the-middle attack in HB family protocols implemented in RFID tags", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 375-390. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPCC-03-2016-0015