Privacy and security concerns are significant barrier for RFID deployment in many applications in modern day world. The implementation of authentication schemes which provide reasonable security under the resource constraints of tiny-powered RFID tags are an efficient way to avoid these concerns. In this paper, we present physical unclonable function based unilateral authentication protocol for RFID system. In addition, we use error-correcting code properties to enhance security of the proposed scheme. Use of error-correcting code also reduces computational cost of the proposed scheme drastically. Security and privacy analysis indicates that the proposed scheme resists various attacks. Cost analysis shows that the scheme outshines the existing protocols in terms of storage requirement, computational operations, and communication cost. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.