On the Privacy of Two Tag Ownership Transfer Protocols for RFIDs

Abstract

In this paper, the privacy of two recent RFID tag ownership transfer protocols are investigated against the tag owners as adversaries. The first protocol called ROTIV is a scheme which provides a privacy-preserving ownership transfer by using an HMACbased authentication with public key encryption. However, our passive attack on this protocol shows that any legitimate owner which has been the owner of a specific tag is able to trace it either in the past or in the future. Tracing the tag is also possible via an active attack for any adversary who is able to tamper the tag and extract its information. The second protocol called, Chen et al.’s protocol, is an ownership transfer protocol for passive RFID tags which conforms EPC Class1 Generation2 standard. Our attack on this protocol shows that the previous owners of a particular tag are able to trace it in future. Furthermore, they are able even to obtain the tag’s secret information at any time in the future which makes them capable of impersonating the tag.