Chaos Based RFID Authentication Protocol

Chaotic systems have been studied for the past few decades because of its complex behaviour given simple governing ordinary differential equations. In the field of cryptology, several methods have been proposed for the use of chaos in cryptosystems. In this work, a method for harnessing the beneficial behaviour of chaos was proposed for use in RFID authentication and encryption. In order to make an accurate estimation of necessary hardware resources required, a complete hardware implementation was designed using a Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA. The results showed that only 470 Xilinx Virtex slices were required, which is significantly less than other RFID authentication methods based on AES block cipher. The total number of clock cycles required per encryption of a 288-bit plaintext was 57 clock cycles. This efficiency level is many times higher than other AES methods for RFID application. Based on a carrier frequency of 13.56Mhz, which is the standard frequency of common encryption enabled passive RFID tags such as ISO-15693, a data throughput of 5.538Kb/s was achieved. As the strength of the proposed RFID authentication and encryption scheme is based on the problem of predicting chaotic systems, it was important to ensure that chaotic behaviour is maintained in this discretized version of Lorenz dynamical system. As a result, key boundaries and fourth order Runge Kutta approximation time step values that are unique for this new mean of chaos utilization were discovered. The result is a computationally efficient and cryptographically complex new RFID authentication scheme that can be readily adopted in current RFID standards such as ISO-14443 and ISO-15693. A proof of security by the analysis of time series data obtained from the hardware FPGA design is also presented. This is to ensure that my proposed method does not exhibit short periodic cycles, has an even probabilistic distribution and builds on the beneficial chaotic properties of the continuous version of Lorenz dynamical system.