As a non-contact identification technology, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is widely used in various Internet of Things applications. However, RFID systems are highly vulnerable to diverse attacks due to the openness of communication links between readers and tags, leading to serious security and privacy concerns. Numerous RFID authentication protocols have been designed that employ hash functions and symmetric cryptography to secure communications. Despite these efforts, such schemes generally exhibit limitations in key management flexibility and scalability, which significantly restricts their applicability in large-scale RFID deployments. Confronted with this challenge, public key cryptography offers an effective solution. Taking into account factors such as parameter size, computational complexity, and resistance to quantum attacks, the NTRU algorithm emerges as one of the most promising choices. Since the NTRU signature algorithm is highly complex and requires large parameters, there are currently only a few NTRU encryption-based RFID authentication protocols available, all of which exhibit significant security flaws-such as supporting only one-way authentication, failing to address public key distribution, and so on. Moreover, performance evaluations of the algorithm in these contexts are often incomplete. This paper proposes a mutual authentication protocol for RFID based on the NTRU encryption algorithm to address security and privacy issues. The security of the protocol is analyzed using the BAN-logic tools and some non-formalized methods, and it is further validated through simulation with the AVISPA tool. With the parameter set (N, p, q) = (443, 3, 2048), the NTRU algorithm can provide 128 bits of post-quantum security strength. This configuration not only demonstrates greater foresight at the theoretical security level but also offers significant advantages in practical energy consumption and computation time when compared to traditional algorithms such as ECC, making it a highly competitive candidate in the field of post-quantum cryptography.
As a non-contact identification technology, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is widely used in various Internet of Things applications. However, RFID systems are highly vulnerable to diverse attacks due to the openness of communication links between readers and tags, leading to serious security and privacy concerns. Numerous RFID authentication protocols have been designed that employ hash functions and symmetric cryptography to secure communications. Despite these efforts, such schemes generally exhibit limitations in key management flexibility and scalability, which significantly restricts their applicability in large-scale RFID deployments. Confronted with this challenge, public key cryptography offers an effective solution. Taking into account factors such as parameter size, computational complexity, and resistance to quantum attacks, the NTRU algorithm emerges as one of the most promising choices. Since the NTRU signature algorithm is highly complex and requires large parameters, there are currently only a few NTRU encryption-based RFID authentication protocols available, all of which exhibit significant security flaws-such as supporting only one-way authentication, failing to address public key distribution, and so on. Moreover, performance evaluations of the algorithm in these contexts are often incomplete. This paper proposes a mutual authentication protocol for RFID based on the NTRU encryption algorithm to address security and privacy issues. The security of the protocol is analyzed using the BAN-logic tools and some non-formalized methods, and it is further validated through simulation with the AVISPA tool. With the parameter set (N, p, q) = (443, 3, 2048), the NTRU algorithm can provide 128 bits of post-quantum security strength. This configuration not only demonstrates greater foresight at the theoretical security level but also offers significant advantages in practical energy consumption and computation time when compared to traditional algorithms such as ECC, making it a highly competitive candidate in the field of post-quantum cryptography.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a prominent technology within the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, offering efficient and reliable object identification in various domains, including business, healthcare, and manufacturing. The security of RFID systems is of paramount importance, and recent authentication protocols have been developed to address these security concerns. In this survey paper, we explore and evaluate the latest authentication protocols designed to enhance security in RFID communications, primarily concentrating on the interaction between RFID readers and tags. We critically assess contemporary lightweight RFID authentication protocols, considering aspects such as security requirements, computational efficiency, and resilience against potential attacks. However, with the advent of quantum computing, these protocols are under scrutiny for their vulnerability. As a result, we emphasize the need for researchers to shift their focus toward post-quantum cryptography solutions to bolster the security of RFID systems. This paper serves as a comprehensive overview of recent developments in RFID authentication, shedding light on the pressing need for quantum-resistant security measures in this field.
As for so many security vulnerabilities, such as readers' ID-disclosure attack, man-in-the-middle attack, spoofing attack in Yao's authentication protocol, we propose a Radio Frequency Identification mutual authentication protocol based on NTRU public key encryption system, and perform formal analysis with GNY logic. The protocol not only has character of once a secret, but also the session key exchanged when mutual authentication protocol completed.Main computing tasks is implemented on the readers, so the pressure of server can be reduced effectively, the position tracking and forward security issues exist in current protocols can be solved as well. Analytic result shows that the proposed mutual authentication protocol can resist replay attack, counterfeit attack, denial of service attacks and other malicious attacks,and has featuresof low computational complexity,little communication,high efficiency. It is suitable for apply this protocol in low-cost tags.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are pervasively employed in critical domains such as smart healthcare, industrial automation, and environmental surveillance, where secure access control is essential. User authentication protocols are vital for thwarting unauthorized intrusions, yet the vast majority of existing schemes rely on conventional public-key cryptography (such as ECC, RSA), which is provably insecure in the post-quantum era due to Shor's algorithm. This motivates the design of post-quantum authentication that is also lightweight for resource-limited sensors. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient authentication and key agreement protocol based on Number Theory Research Unit (NTRU), a lattice-based cryptosystem offering proven resistance to quantum attacks. We have proven the correctness and security of our scheme through BAN logic and random oracle model and demonstrated through informal analysis that our scheme can resist various attack methods and possesses high security features. Moreover, we thoroughly evaluate our protocol against the most recent state-of-the-art schemes. The results indicate that our scheme has the lowest computational cost, and its communication cost is superior to that of most other schemes. Overall, our proposed protocol provides a robust, efficient, and future-proof authentication solution for WSNs, well-suited for deploying WSNs environments.
We propose a novel quantum-resistant mutual authentication scheme for radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems. Our scheme uses lattice-based cryptography and, in particular, achieves quantum-resistance by leveraging the hardness of the inhomogeneous short integer solution (ISIS) problem. In contrast to prior work, which assumes that the reader-server communication channel is secure, our scheme is secure even when both the reader-server and tag-reader communication channels are insecure. Our proposed protocol provides robust security against man-in-the-middle (MITM), replay, impersonation, and reflection attacks, while also ensuring unforgeability and preserving anonymity. We present a detailed security analysis, including semi-formal analysis and formal verification using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. In addition, we analyze the storage, computation, and communication costs of the proposed protocol and compare its security properties with those of existing protocols, demonstrating that our scheme offers strong security guarantees. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first quantum-resistant authentication protocol for RFID systems that comprehensively addresses the insecurity of both the reader-server and tag-reader communication channels.
Underwater communication (UWC) systems are critical for maritime exploration, environmental monitoring, and defense, yet their security remains vulnerable to quantum computing threats. Recent studies estimate that 65% of underwater infrastructure relies on classical cryptographic protocols, which could be compromised by quantum algorithms within the next decade. Existing solutions, such as ECC-based authentication and lightweight symmetric cryptography, lack scalability, quantum resistance, or resilience against adversarial attacks in highlatency underwater environments. To address this gap, this study proposes a Post-Quantum Authentication Protocol integrating NTRU lattice-based encryption and the Falcon hash function, designed to resist quantum attacks while operating efficiently in resource-constrained UWC networks. The proposed protocol leverages NTRU's hardness assumptions over truncated polynomial rings and Falcon's collision-resistant hashing to ensure mutual authentication, integrity, and confidentiality. Comparative analysis with prior works demonstrates a 40% reduction in communication overhead and 35% faster encryption/decryption cycles, validated through simulations on underwater acoustic modems. This work establishes a robust framework for securing UWC systems against both classical and quantum threats.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Near Field Communication (NFC) are wireless technologies applied in several domains, among which, remote education.The communication between different components of this system is unsecured, which may lead to several security and privacy problems.Designing authentication protocols to protect a remote education system in an open environment (e.g.NFC, RFID, and Internet) is a challenging task.Recently, Yang et al. proposed a mutual authentication protocol based on the hash function for RFID systems to secure this system.Yang et al. showed that their protocol is secure and can resist various attacks.This work proves that Yang et al.'s protocol does not achieve reader authentication, location privacy, and security forward.Furthermore, we propose an enhanced authentication protocol for secure remote education systems (EAP-SRES) using NFC technology.Our protocol is based on post-quantum cryptosystem to resist quantum attacks.Security analysis by using CL-AtSe (Constraint Logic based Attack Searcher) tool and Ouafi-Phan privacy model shows that the EAP-SRES protocol achieves the requirements of mutual authentication, untraceability and resists different possible attacks.In addition, EAP-SRES protocol is very efficient in term of performance.