RFID AUTHENTICATION PROTOCOLS BASED ON ELLIPTIC CURVES - A Top-Down Evaluation Survey
Michael J. Hutter · 2009
Authentication of RFID tags is a challenging task due to the resource-constrained environment they are oper- ating in. In this article, we present a top-down evaluation survey for RFID-tag authentication based on elliptic curves. First, we describe a general model to characterize different state-of-the-art public-key techniques that provide entity and message authentication. Second, we present practical results of evaluations of elliptic- curve based identification and signature schemes. We analyzed and compared the ECSchnorr, ECOkamoto, and ECGPS protocol with respect to their computational complexity, storage requirement, and communica- tion overhead. Furthermore, we examine different certificate-management solutions in RFID applications and give size estimations from simulated scenarios. Our studies have led us to the result that elliptic-curve based identification schemes and signature schemes have nearly the same complexity. ECOkamoto provides more enhanced security features while ECGPS has been designed for efficient on-the-fly authentication using of- fline pre-computations. ECSchnorr might be preferred if primitive computation is performed online during tag authentication.