Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a new technology for remotely identification using a small and inexpensive device called RFID tags. Despite the productivity and convenience provided by RFID, it introduces serious security and privacy risks. To avoid violation of privacy, different authentication protocol have been proposed. In this article, we present a lightweight authentication scheme using one-way hash function and syndrome decoding. The scheme also introduces key classes to avoids exhaustive database search. In the scheme, there is no secure channel required between reader and back-end server. Also, in the scheme, we are not transmitting nonce in communication channel directly. The reader/server can get nonce by using linear code properties. The scheme provides higher level privacy and achieves better efficiency. Our analysis results demonstrates that the level of privacy is high in comparison to other well-known schemes. Also, its comparison table shows that the proposed scheme uses very less resources in comparison to others. © 2017 IEEE.