Survey on Lightweight Primitives and Protocols for RFID in Wireless Sensor Networks

The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies is becoming widespread in all kind of wireless network-based applications. As expected, applications based on sensor networks, ad-hoc or mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can be highly benefited from the adoption of RFID solutions. There is a strong need to employ lightweight cryptographic primitives for many security applications because of the tight cost and constrained resource requirement of sensor based networks. This paper mainly focuses on the security analysis of lightweight protocols and algorithms proposed for the security of RFID systems. A large number of research solutions have been proposed to implement lightweight cryptographic primitives and protocols in sensor and RFID integration based resource constraint networks. In this work, an overview of the currently discussed lightweight primitives and their attributes has been done. These primitives and protocols have been compared based on gate equivalents (GEs), power, technology, strengths, weaknesses and attacks. Further, an integration of primitives and protocols is compared with the possibilities of their applications in practical scenarios

Symmetric Encryption Based Privacy using Lightweight Cryptography for RFID Tags

RFID technology emerged as the promising technology for its ease of use and implementation in the ubiquitous computing world. RFID is deployed widely in various applications that use automatic identification and processing for information retrieval. The primary components of an RFID system are the RFID tag (active and passive), the reader and the back-end server (database). Cost is the main factor that drove RFID tags to its immense utilization in which passive tags dominate in today's widely deployed RFID practice. Passive tags are low cost RFID tags conjoined to several consumer products (like clothes, smart cards and devices, courier, container, etc) for the purpose of unique identification. Readers on the other hand act as a source to track and record the passive RFID tag's activities (like modifications, updates and authentication). Due to the rapid growth of RFID practice in the past few years, measures for consumer privacy and security has been researched. The uncertainties that arise with the passive RFID tags are handling of user's private information (like name, ID, house address, credit card number, health statement, etc) which are posed to considerable threat from the adversary. Passive tags are inexpensive and contain less overhead and are considered good performers and consequently lack in providing security and privacy. Lightweight cryptography is an area of cryptography developed for low cost resourced environment. Mutual authentication is defined as the process of verifying an authorized tag and a reader (reader and server respectively) by an agreed algorithm to mutually prove their legitimacy with each other. Adversary is a third party who tries to hear the ongoing communication between the tag and the reader (reader and server respectively) anonymously. In this thesis, symmetric lightweight ciphers like Present and Grain are introduced as mutual authentication protocols to rescue the privacy aspects and properties of the RFID tags. These ciphers are simple, faster and suitable to implement within the passive RFID network and reasonably lay a foundation for the preservation of privacy and security of the RFID system. Lightweight ciphers use hash functions, pseudo random generators, SP networks and linear feedback shift registers to randomize data while mutual authentication scheme uses lightweight ciphers to manage authorize the legitimacy of every device in the RFID network

Fully Integrated Passive UHF RFID Tag for Hash-Based Mutual Authentication Protocol

Passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag has been used in many applications. While the RFID market is expected to grow, concerns about security and privacy of the RFID tag should be overcome for the future use. To overcome these issues, privacy-preserving authentication protocols based on cryptographic algorithms have been designed. However, to the best of our knowledge, evaluation of the whole tag, which includes an antenna, an analog front end, and a digital processing block, that runs authentication protocols has not been studied. In this paper, we present an implementation and evaluation of a fully integrated passive UHF RFID tag that runs a privacy-preserving mutual authentication protocol based on a hash function. We design a single chip including the analog front end and the digital processing block. We select a lightweight hash function supporting 80-bit security strength and a standard hash function supporting 128-bit security strength. We show that when the lightweight hash function is used, the tag completes the protocol with a reader-tag distance of 10 cm. Similarly, when the standard hash function is used, the tag completes the protocol with the distance of 8.5 cm. We discuss the impact of the peak power consumption of the tag on the distance of the tag due to the hash function