A Secure RFID Authentication Scheme for Healthcare Environments Based on Digital Signature Algorithm

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology can help a wide range of individuals and organizations realize significant productivity expansions and efficiencies. It provides also an efficient and accurate access to medical data for health professionals. In this paper, first we investigate the security of Zhao's protocol, which has been recently proposed as a secure RFID authentication protocol for healthcare environments. We show that the proposed enhancements, to overcome the key compromise problem in Liao and Hsiao protocol, remains vulnerable to tracking attack. Therefore, with the aim of increasing patient safety, we propose a new authentication scheme based on elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) combined with a recursive hash function. The security analysis shows that the suggested scheme could solve security weaknesses of Zhao's protocol and some previously proposed protocols. In addition, the proposed scheme is more efficient in terms of communication and computational cost compared to that of the related protocols.