Minimalist cryptography for low-cost RFID tags (extended abstract)

  • Authors:
  • Ari Juels

  • Affiliations:
  • RSA Laboratories, Bedford, MA

  • Venue:
  • SCN'04 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Security in Communication Networks
  • Year:
  • 2004

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

A radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag is a small, inexpensive microchip that emits an identifier in response to a query from a nearby reader. The price of these tags promises to drop to the range of $0.05 per unit in the next several years, offering a viable and powerful replacement for barcodes. The challenge in providing security for low-cost RFID tags is that they are computationally weak devices, unable to perform even basic symmetric-key cryptographic operations. Security researchers often therefore assume that good privacy protection in RFID tags is unattainable. In this paper, we explore a notion of minimalist cryptography suitable for RFID tags. We consider the type of security obtainable in RFID devices with a small amount of rewritable memory, but very limited computing capability. Our aim is to show that standard cryptography is not necessary as a starting point for improving security of very weak RFID devices. Our contribution is twofold: We propose a new security model for authentication and privacy in RFID tags. This model takes into account the natural computational limitations and the likely attack scenarios for RFID tags in real-world settings. It represents a useful divergence from standard cryptographic security modeling, and thus a new basis for practical formalization of minimal security requirements for low-cost RFID-tag security. We describe a protocol that provably achieves the properties of authentication and privacy in RFID tags in our proposed model, and in a good practical sense. It involves no computationally intensive cryptographic operations, and relatively little storage.