In the era of the Internet of Communication Technologies (ICT), the Internet is becoming more popular and widely used across the world. Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) has become a prominent technology in healthcare systems for identifying tagged objects. The RFID tags are attached to the billions of different healthcare devices or things in several associated applications. However, RFID tags’ security and privacy are regarded as the two biggest concerns. An adversary might eavesdrop, tamper, or even intercept the transmitted messages in RFID systems. Also, the privacy of the users (patients, doctors, and nurses) may breach. In past years, numerous ultralightweight RFID authentication schemes have been proposed in the healthcare sector. However, all these schemes were pointed out as insecure under several known security attacks namely, replay, impersonation, full-disclosure, and de-synchronization attacks. Keeping in view such security flaws, we present an efficient and reliable ultralightweight RFID authentication scheme (ER²AS) for healthcare systems to enhance patients’ medication safety. The scheme employs bitwise XOR, circular left–right rotations, and our proposed ultralighweight reformation operation to achieve higher-level security. The security and privacy evaluations demonstrate that ER²AS scheme resists several known security attacks. The performance analysis also demonstrates that it incurs lower computation and storage overhead on the RFID tags, thus making it practical to be implemented in real-time healthcare environments.

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.