L-CAHASH: A novel lightweight hash function based on cellular automata for RFID

Abstract

Considered as the main element for building Internet of Things, Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is a non-contact automatic identification technology that identifies the tag signal, in order to collect instructions that should be transmitted to the controller. However, it suffers from some threats (i.e. physical attacks, eavesdropping, cloning, tracking, etc.). Thus, ensuring data privacy becomes one of the paramount security interests. Hash functions are an essential mechanism in achieving data integrity. Nevertheless, the heavy duty classical existent hash functions are unsuitable for these RFID tags, since they require small amount of computation. Accordingly, in this paper, a new lightweight hash function based on cellular automata (L-CAHASH) is proposed. This approach gives a high randomness quality and fast software hashing comparing to well-known lightweight hash functions. The robustness and the efficiency of our new proposed hash function is analyzed and the obtained results show that this new hash function meets the RFID tags’ security requirement.