AbstractsComputer Science

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.