Security Analysis of a Lightweight Ownership Transfer Protocol in RFID Systems

With the increasing use of RFID tags, there is a need for specific protocols to communicate with these tags. Among these protocols, the ownership transfer stands out as it ensures the security and privacy of objects for the new owner after a change of ownership. Recently, a lightweight object ownership transfer protocol has been proposed for RFID networks. This protocol utilizes a lightweight linear function for security. The designers of the protocol claim that it is secure against known attacks while also being lightweight. In this paper, we identify vulnerabilities in the function used in this protocol and demonstrate that it is susceptible to the secret disclosure attack. We show that with at most 4 × L executions of the protocol (where L is the key length), one can obtain the necessary information from intercepted data to execute the attack and subsequently recover the shared keys used in the protocol.