Simulation and cost analysis of group authentication protocols

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an efficient technology for identification, tracking and group proof construction. The multi-round protocols for authentication and group proof construction increase the cost with increase in participants. In this work, computational and communication cost of multi-round protocol is calculated to identify the protocol with least cost and high security. The computational cost is computed using number of rounds and messages, Message Authentication Code (MACO) operations, messages sent per participant and messages received per participant. The communication cost is computed using size of message sent and size of message received. In order to reduce the computational and communication cost, two lightweight group authentication protocols are selected for refinement. The protocols are: Juel's protocol, and Saito and Sakurai protocol. Three refinements are proposed which convert these protocols from two-party group construction to n-party group construction. Results show that refinements reduce the cost compared to Juel's protocol and Saito and Sakurai's protocol. It is observed that high security in group proof construction is still infeasible, thus if security is required to be maximum then multi-round protocol should be preferred. In this work, a multi-round authentication protocol of [1] is analyzed for comparative security analysis. Simulation analysis shows that performance of proposed authentication protocol in multi-round category as well as single-round category is better than state-of-art protocols.