A Hybrid ECC-Based Lightweight Authentication Scheme for IoT and RFID

The impact of the IoT’s growing influence is increasing daily in every area. Every year, billions of phones are connected to this network, which is expanding the IoT network. Radio Frequency identification (RFID) technology has become more mature and provides part of the IoT physical layer for many devices in smart environments through low-cost, energyautonomous, and disposable sensors. The RFID system consists of a transponder or tag, an interrogator, and a back-end host system. The mobile RFID service allows users to access the RFID application service on their smartphones by integrating the RFID system with the mobile communication system. This service requires an RFID reader that can be carried around or put on a user’s smartphone. The significant limitations of RFID technology are security and privacy concerns. Many methods, including encryption, authentication, and hardware techniques, have been presented to overcome security and privacy problems. The proposed scheme focuses on authentication between the server and the RFID sensor. The proposed scheme is a hybrid lightweight authentication scheme that combines the strengths of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and one-time password (OTP) mechanisms. By leveraging Montgomery curves for computational efficiency and incorporating mutual authentication between devices and servers, this scheme is tailored to meet IoT and RFID systems’ security and resource constraints. The proposed protocol ensures forward and backward security, resists replay and tracking attacks, and supports scalability in multidevice environments.