Light-Weight Authentication Schemes with Applications to RFID Systems

Abstract

The first line of defence against wireless attacks in Radio Frequency Identi cation (RFID) systems is authentication of tags and readers. RFID tags are very constrained in terms of power, memory and size of circuit. Therefore, RFID tags are not capable of performing sophisticated cryptographic operations. In this dissertation, we have designed light-weight authentication schemes to securely identify the RFID tags to readers and vice versa. The authentication schemes require simple binary operations and can be readily implemented in resource-constrained Radio Frequency Identi cation (RFID) tags. We provide a formal proof of security based on the di culty of solving the Syndrome Decoding (SD) problem. Authentication veri es the unique identity of an RFID tag making it possible to track a tag across multiple readers. We further protect the identity of RFID tags by a light-weight privacy protecting identifi cation scheme based on the di culty of the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) complexity assumption. To protect RFID tags authentication against the relay attacks, we have designed a resistance scheme in the analog realm that does not have the practicality issues of existing solutions. Our scheme is based on the chaos-suppression theory and it is robust to inconsistencies, such as noise and parameters mismatch. Furthermore, our solutions are based on asymmetric-key algorithms that better facilitate the distribution of cryptographic keys in large systems. We have provided a secure broadcast encryption protocol to effi ciently distribute cryptographic keys throughout the system with minimal communication overheads. The security of the proposed protocol is formally proven in the adaptive adversary model, which simulates the attacker in the real world.