Design and implementation of a security layer for RFID systems

Abstract

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is a technology whose employment will certainly grow in the following years. It is therefore necessary to consider the security issues that come out from the implementation of that type of systems. In this paper we present an approach to solve the security problems in RFID systems by designing a naive security layer based on authentication and encryption algorithms. The authentication mechanism is the mutual authentication based on a three-way handshaking model, which authenticates both the reader and the tag in the communication protocol. The cipher algorithm based on a symmetric-key cryptosystem is RC4 implemented in a proposed modification to the existing WEP protocol to make it more secure in terms of message privacy. The proposed approach is implemented using VHDL in FPGAs communicated through RF transceivers. The results show that the security layer is simple enough to be implemented in a low-price RFID tag.