UDAP: ultra-lightweight dot product-based authentication protocol for RFID systems

Abstract The emergence of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in the era of the Internet of Things represents a remarkable advancement, but also brings its own set of challenges. Low-cost RFID tags, key elements of this ecosystem, face major security and privacy issues due to their limited computational and memory capacities. To overcome these issues, we focused on the design of an ultralightweight RFID authentication protocol named UDAP, which incorporates simplified cryptographic techniques such as dot product, XOR, and left rotation. This approach aims to enhance the levels of security and confidentiality while concurrently minimizing the impact on the tag’s limited resources. Both informal and formal analysis of our protocol, including the use of the Scyther simulation tool, has demonstrated its effectiveness in countering the most known security attacks. To measure the efficiency of our proposed protocol, an Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation was carried out, allowing for precise evaluation of the resource consumption of the key function used in our protocol. This implementation has shown that our protocol is not only secure but also utilizes minimal resource consumption, making it particularly suitable for resource constrained RFID tags.