ESRAS: An efficient and secure ultra-lightweight RFID authentication scheme for low-cost tags

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies rapidly evolve and are used in many real-life applications. One of the core technologies used in various IoT applications is Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology. RFID wirelessly and uniquely identifies the tagged objects without a direct line of sight. However, the research community had reported privacy and security-related concerns in RFID systems, where an adversary may tamper, eavesdrop, add, delete, or even modify the transmitted messages over an insecure communication channel. To address the issues mentioned above, we propose an Efficient, Secure, and practical ultra-lightweight RFID Authentication Scheme (ESRAS), which uses rank operation for low-cost tags. We utilize a simplistic bitwise exclusive-OR, circular left rotation, and a newly proposed ultra-lightweight rank operation to provide high security at low cost. The analysis of ESRAS concerning its security and performance shows that it effectively resists several known attacks and is relatively superior to the existing schemes regarding the computational and storage costs. Moreover, ESRAS shows more suitability for low-cost RFID tags and can be executed in a multimedia big data environment.