Universally Composable RFID Mutual Authentication Universally Composable (UC) framework provides the strongest security notion for designing fully trusted cryptographic protocols, and it is very challenging on applying UC security in the design ofRFID mutual authentication protocols. In this paper, we formulate the necessary conditions for achieving UC secure RFID mutual authentication protocols which can be fully trusted in arbitrary environment, and indicate the inadequacy of some existing schemes under the UC framework. We define the ideal functionality for RFID mutual authentication and propose the first UC secure RFIDmutual authentication protocol based on public key encryption and certain trusted third parties which can be modeled as functionalities. We prove the security of our protocol under the strongest adversary model assuming both the tags’ and readers’ corruptions. We also present two (public) key update protocols for the cases of multiple readers: one uses Message Authentication Code (MAC) and the other uses trusted certificates in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Furthermore, we address the relations between our UC framework and the zero-knowledge privacy model proposed by Deng et al.