The invention relates to an RFID (radio frequency identification) mutual authentication protocol method, which comprises the following three stages: a tag identification stage, a mutual authentication stage and an update stage, wherein at the tag identification stage, a reader sends a request to a tag, and the tag returns an identification section (IDS) to the reader after receiving the request; at the mutual authentication stage, after the IDS is identified by the reader, an exclusive-or operation related to a digital synthetic operation is conducted to obtain A and B, A and B are sent to the tag, after the reader is identified by the tag through received A||B, related calculation is conducted to obtain C, C is sent to the reader, and the tag is identified by the reader; and at the update stage, after C is successfully identified by the reader, IDS and secret keys (K1 and K2) in C are updated, then D and E are calculated and sent to the tag, and after E is successfully identified by the tag, IDS and secret keys of E are updated. Only the simple digital synthetic or exclusive-or operation exists in the RFID mutual authentication protocol method. Therefore, the RFID mutual authentication protocol method has the beneficial effects that the calculation amount and storage space of the tag can be effectively reduced, various attacks such as impersonation, retransmission, tracking and denial of service can be resisted, and forward security is provided.