LIGHTWEIGHT ENCRYPTION SCHEME FOR RFID

Abstract

Due to the tight cost and constrained resources of high volume consumer devices such as RFID tags, smart cards and wireless sensor nodes, it is desirable to employ lightweight and specialized cryptographic primitives for many security applications. It is widely believed that there is a trade-off between speed and security in cryptosystem design. No existing encryption algorithms are both fast enough for high-speed operation and sufficiently secure to withstand powerful cryptanalysis. Our objective is to design the ciphers that are suitable for security in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and other security applications with demanding area restrictions. In this work, we propose and analyze a generic construction of high-speed encryption schemes. Our solution is based on the fact that there exist secure lightweight hybrid cipher i.e. Hummingbird, which is the mainly designed for resource constrained environment like RFID technology, wireless sensors and other smart devices. The consumption of power is less and encryption speed is faster in Hummingbird. It is resistant to most of the cryptanalytic attacks common to block ciphers and stream ciphers such as linear and differential cryptanalysis. But to make the scheme more secure than the existing ones, we combine a secure hybrid cipher with a super-fast stream cipher such that the resulting encryption scheme is more secure than the existing ones and is faster too. In this encryption scheme, we are generating the keys using hybrid cipher Hummingbird, in such a way that the output of Hummingbird is used as a key for superfast stream cipher scheme to encrypt the text. In this thesis work, all architectures proposed, are simulated by means of MentorGraphics ModelSim tool in order to verify the correct designs and functionality. For the development (synthesis) Xilinx simulator tool is used. Specifically, a loop architecture has been used, where one basic round is used iteratively. The basic performance metrics are the area, power consumption associated with the implementation resulting throughput of each cipher. We have compared the results with the existing schemes. Hummingbird, AES and the variants of Hummingbird have been employed in the comparison. Furthermore, we also presented the software implementation of the scheme and compare the performance of the proposed scheme on both the platforms i.e. Hardware as well as the software platforms.