Graduation Semester and Year

2010

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering

Department

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor

Daniel Engels

Abstract

In this thesis, I propose and evaluate several methods to integrate security within the identification process and memory access processes of the ISO 18000-6C (or GEN2) passive UHF radio frequency identification (RFID) protocol. The RFID Tags are promiscuous and they emit their unique identifiers in clear upon interrogation from the Reader. They do not have a mutual authentication process to validate the Readers and Tags, this allows eavesdropping, illicit reading from a malicious Reader and counterfeit Tags. GEN2 Tags are being integrated into driver's licenses and being used for border crossing identities; thus, there is a need to secure both the identification process and memory access. To mitigate these threats, I integrate the strong cryptographic ciphers AES, PRESENT and XTEA into the GEN2 protocol and investigate their properties in secure identification and mutual authentication process. The mutual authentication protocol also enables a secure communication channel for the Readers and the Tags to communicate.An FPGA implementation of the GEN2 protocol integrated with the ciphers are done using VHDL and a comparison is made in terms of area, speed and power consumption. The simulation results show that integration of PRESENT and XTEA within GEN2 allows faster operation as compared to AES. PRESENT occupies the least hardware resources and has lower power consumption compared to AES and XTEA. The GEN2 protocol can be secured with strong cryptographic ciphers with minimal impact on identification rate and memory access.

Disciplines

Electrical and Computer Engineering | Engineering

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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