A Hybrid Privacy-Preserving Mutual Authentication Protocol For Rfid Traffic Management

This study focuses on security and performance of RFID systems in a traffic management application. We propose a scalable hybrid privacy-preserving mutual authentication protocol especially suitable for this application. Our main goal is to improve the authentication efficiency by taking advantage of both symmetric and asymmetric encryption mechanisms. We analyze the security of the protocol against unauthorized tag reading, tag modification, replay attacks, man-in-the-middle, and tracking. In order to examine the performance of the system, an automatic toll collection system is considered where a single reader is installed on a road segment to identify the vehicles, which are equipped with RFID tags, passing through the coverage area. Our simulation results show that the successful read-rate of the tags in the hybrid model can be up to 20% more than the asymmetric model depending on the traffic model and the reader-server communication delay. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that a symmetric mutual authentication model is not scalable, and as the number of tags in the system grows, the reading rate decreases significantly.