Attacks on and countermeasures for two RFID protocols

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is expected to play a key role in the Internet of Things (IoT) and has applications in a wide variety of domains ranging from automation to healthcare systems. Therefore, the security and privacy of RFID communication is critical. In this paper, we analyze two recent RFID protocols proposed by researchers. Specifically we show that the ownership transfer protocol proposed by Wang et al., is vulnerable to tracing attacks while the mutual authentication protocol proposed by Cho et al. is vulnerable to key disclosure and backward traceable attacks. We propose secure improvements to these protocols to address the vulnerabilities, and improve the scalability of these schemes making them suitable for large-scale deployments.